Author Question: In what different places do we follow Paul throughout the story? How dothese settings (and the boys ... (Read 59 times)

bucstennis@aim.com · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

In what different places do we follow Paul throughout the story? How dothese settings (and the boys reactions to them) help us understand him, his attitudes, his personality?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

What do the artsmusic, painting, theatermean to Paul? How does hereact when exposed to them? Is he himself an artist?

What will be an ideal response?

bubulittle310@msn.cn · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

Cather shows us Paul in school, at home, in the art gallery, in the theater, and, finally, in the big city. Everywhere, he functions apart from the ordinary beings who surround him. Isolated and unhappy, Paul regards his aesthetic longings as evidence of his superiority to other human beings. Absence of hope and cool disdain for the ordinary ways of attaining wealth and finery and an invitation to New York drive him to one grand, suicidal fling in the beautiful, glamorous world where he imagines he belongs.

Answer to Question 2

Oddly, when he hears a concert, its not that symphonies, as such, mean anything in particular to Paul (par. 11). The romance and beauty in the air excite him to hysteria. He reacts in the same way to fine food and wine, good clothes, a lavishly decorated room. For all his sensitivity, he is not an artist, and he doesnt respond to art as an artist would. Its the idea of art and beauty, the pleasure they afford his senses, that evoke a response in him. In Willa: The Life of Willa Cather, Phyllis C. Robinson points out that Paul may have had the sensitivity of an artist but, unlike his creator, he was without discipline, without direction and, saddest and most hopeless of all, he was without talent. In that fact lies his private tragedy.