SOURCE: Salda, Michael N. “What Really Happens in Cather's ‘Paul's Case?’” Studies in Short Fiction 29, no. 1 (winter 1992): 113–19.

In the following essay, Salda questions the standard critical interpretation of the ending to “Paul's Case,” positing instead that the title character does not necessarily die.

Critics agree that Paul commits suicide by throwing himself before a train at the end of Willa Cather's “Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament.” But is this the only reading possible; in fact, is this reading even likely given the story's details? Bessie du Bois, one of Cather's earliest reviewers, quotes the final paragraphs of “Paul's Case” and then says something that would strike most readers as quite odd: “One feels rather defrauded that the author has omitted to say what came next; it would have been so easy to go on” (du Bois 613).¹ With Paul's broken body hurtling through the air, one wonders what...