Isolation and Death in Cather's Paul's Case and Melville
This paper compares the themes of psychological and social isolation in Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" and Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," focusing on how each protagonist enacts a Freudian death wish. While both Paul and Bartleby are social outcasts whose nonconformity marks them as deviants, they approach death from strikingly different psychological positions. Paul is passionate and idealistic, driven by a belief that money alone separates him from happiness, while Bartleby has long since surrendered his will to live. The paper examines their contrasting narrative perspectives, attitudes toward life and money, symbolic uses of death, and ultimately argues that Paul, had he survived, might have become the silent, despairing figure Bartleby already was.
- Introduction: Two Protagonists Bound for Death: Shared death trajectories of Paul and Bartleby
- Narrative Perspective and Character Interiority: How narration shapes access to each character
- Attitudes Toward Life, Money, and Despair: Paul's idealism versus Bartleby's resignation
- Nonconformity, Deviance, and Social Labeling: Both characters marked as social outcasts
- The Freudian Death Wish in Literature: Death drive theory applied to both texts
- Symbolism of Death: The Train and The Tombs: Suicide methods as death symbols in each story
- Conclusion: Divergent Paths, Shared Fate: Shared fate despite contrasting psychological paths
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its literary comparison in a clear theoretical framework — the Freudian death drive — and applies it consistently across both texts throughout the analysis.
- Quotations from primary texts are well-integrated and used to support specific analytical claims rather than simply to summarize plot.
- The paper sustains a productive tension: Paul and Bartleby share a trajectory toward death, yet their psychological profiles are meaningfully contrasted, preventing the comparison from becoming reductive.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates comparative close reading across two short stories. Rather than treating each text separately, it uses alternating analysis — presenting one character's behavior, then contrasting it with the other's — to build an argument about how the same theme (the death wish) can manifest through opposite psychological orientations. The use of secondary theoretical sources (Freud, Smith) to frame the primary texts is a strong model for incorporating theory into literary analysis.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing the shared trajectory of both protagonists and the central theoretical lens. It then examines how narrative perspective shapes reader access to each character's interiority, followed by an analysis of how their attitudes toward life and money diverge. A section on social deviance and labeling connects both characters' fates to societal pressure. The paper then applies Freudian theory to the death wish directly before analyzing specific death symbols — the train and the prison. The conclusion ties the comparison together with a speculative claim about Paul's probable future had he survived.
Introduction: Two Protagonists Bound for Death
Willa Cather and Herman Melville both explore themes of psychological and social isolation in their short stories. In Cather's Paul's Case, the title character is a vibrant young man whose passion and creativity are constrained by his pitiful life in Pittsburgh, where his only solace is his work as an usher. Melville's protagonist Bartleby in Bartleby the Scrivener lacks the joie de vivre that Paul possesses. However, both protagonists plummet toward death as the only foreseeable relief from the terrible injunctions of life.
Their approaches to death are different, though. Bartleby is wholly unlike the young Paul, who feels regret the instant he realizes the "folly of his haste" (Cather para. 65). On the contrary, the older Bartleby remains fully resigned to self-abnegation throughout his adult life. Whereas Paul believes that if he only had money he could be free from the clutches of his past and embrace potential futures, Bartleby has no hope. He is practically passive and powerless, and has succumbed fully to depression and near-catatonia. Both Paul and Bartleby actively fulfill the Freudian death wish. Although Paul would have preferred to live and pursue his dreams, Bartleby might have preferred to die a long time ago, when his dreams first perished.
Narrative Perspective and Character Interiority
The reader is never privy to Bartleby's inner world, because the story of Bartleby the scrivener is told from the perspective of the Wall Street office manager, who encounters Bartleby when both men are well along in years. Bartleby piques the narrator's curiosity to a great degree, which is why the narrator feels compelled to tell his story: "I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature" (Melville para. 1). Melville's irony in this passage underscores the importance of Bartleby as a symbol for collective human suffering. Moreover, Bartleby's ironic passivity remains a core theme of the short story. He becomes a Gandhi-esque figure in that his form of protest manifests as non-violence, peaceful resistance, and civil disobedience rather than aggressive action. Doing nothing — refusing to work and refusing to eat — becomes paradoxically active behavior. Bartleby hastens his own death, rather than throwing himself in front of a train as Paul does.
Cather does present the reader with considerable insight into Paul's case, which is told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator sympathetic to Paul's situation. Unlike Bartleby, Paul has his whole life ahead of him. He has yet to be completely broken down by the system as Bartleby has been. Paul "bounded up with a start" in the mornings and felt "everything was quite perfect" during his new life in New York City (Cather para. 46). Furthermore, Paul was never depressed, except when he was forced to conform to the dreary reality of his high school. Even though he was on his own, he "was not in the least abashed or lonely" (para. 52). Paul retains his naivety and idealism, which is why he makes some of the rash choices he does, including stealing money, running away to New York, and jumping in front of a moving train. It is highly likely that had he not killed himself, and had his father succeeded in bringing Paul back to Pittsburgh, Paul would have ended up much like Bartleby: a broken man with broken dreams.
Attitudes Toward Life, Money, and Despair
Their different approaches to death stem from the differences between Paul's and Bartleby's approaches to life. For Paul, life is vibrant and full of potential — potential that seems out of reach for someone without money. Paul learns of "the omnipotence of wealth" and views money as his primary obstacle: "money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted" (Cather para. 48; 61). Money means little to Bartleby, who has been utterly stripped of the will to live. The narrator paid Bartleby even when he stopped working, and this did nothing to prevent Bartleby's descent into despair.
Conclusion: Divergent Paths, Shared Fate
Paul might have preferred to live out his days in a posh New York hotel, but Bartleby seems to have buried his hopes and dreams somewhere deep in his subconscious. Both Paul and Bartleby have a classical Freudian death wish, but they manifest their respective death wishes differently. Death liberates both Paul and Bartleby from the prison of the material world. Their differential responses to life, and to death, are what distinguishes Bartleby from Paul. Otherwise, these two characters share remarkably similar trajectories. If Paul had grown up, he might have become the silent, despairing man Bartleby had already become by the end of his life. As it was, Paul died much as he lived, in a flash of unfulfilled dreams. "Paul dropped back into the immense design of things" (Cather 66).
Works Cited
Cather, Willa. "Paul's Case." Retrieved online:
Freud, Sigmund. "Part Two: The Dream." Retrieved online:
Melville, Herman. "Bartleby the Scrivener." Retrieved online:
Skelton, John. "Death and Dying in Literature." Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. Vol. 9, 2003, pp. 211–217.
Smith, Robert Rowland. Death-Drive. Edinburgh: EUP, 2010.
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