Character study of paul pdf

The protagonist of Cather’s story is described in careful physical and behavioral detail. Tall and thin, with bright, glassy eyes, Paul sticks out from his fellow students both in his appearance—he wears dandyish accessories like an opal pin and a red carnation—and in his flamboyant demeanor. Although he is often playful, performative, and defiant, he is privately quite depressed. Paul feels deeply alienated from everyone around him in Pittsburgh High School and on Cordelia Street, where he lives with his father and sisters. The narrator doesn’t identify the roots of this alienation and despair in explicit terms, but through the liberal use of innuendo makes it clear that Paul is a homosexual—an identity that, at the turn of the twentieth century in suburban Pittsburgh, was forbidden, and even dangerous to express. Caught between warring impulses to repress his sexuality and to express his difference defiantly and flamboyantly, Paul deals with his alienation in a number of ways, though most dramatically by inventing fairy-tale worlds of art and sensual pleasure, imagining that t

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