"Paul's Case, by Willa Cather, is the story of a young man named Paul, whose appetite for a life filled with riches lead him to stealing and to his ultimate self demise. After being suspended from school and sent to work Paul has the opportunity to pocket one-thousand dollars. After doing so he embarks on a journey to New York where all his superficial desires are fulfilled. When the realization sets in that he has reached the pinnacle of his being and the only place to go is down and back to the life he so desperately tried to escape he stares down the barrel of a pistol. But he hasn't the balls to pull the trigger and suicide finds him in the form of a freight train. Cather implies that people often feel a lack of self-worth once they conceive the fact that their ambitions are unattainable. Cather also indicates that people often covet that in which they cannot attain.
Paul is continually driven to his actions by the desire to be perceived as those who sit on the top step of their "stoop" along Cordelia Street. Throughout the story the Narrator gives the evidence of Paul's feeling that he was dealt a hand in which he didn't deserve. Paul did not enjoy working at Carnegie Hall. Paul did not enjoy seating the "early comers." However, what Paul did enjoy and what gave him satisfaction was when the light dimmed and he sunk down into his chair and pretended that he was one of "them." This desire to become a citizen of higher class is what inevitably became his fatal flaw. .
Paul is continually bugged with the burden of not being in the in-crowd. Paul wants to wear nice overcoats and wear fresh carnations in his buttonhole and go to symphonies and leave the country for a vacation and hang out with the artists he admires. But unfortunately for Paul, he was not born into the life that he wishes he was. Paul's flaw was that he was not happy with himself, and he would do anything to get out of the life that he was living which ultimately led him to stealing.