Paul's Case: What It Means To Achieve Happiness In Life

The definition of what it means to truly obtain and achieve happiness in life has been explored by hundreds of philosophers over the decades. In spite of this being the case for the subject, not one of these philosophers have found an exact answer to such a question. One cannot measure happiness and its capacity. As a result of this, people have no choice but to determine their own judgement of what happiness is to them. This judgement can easily be affected by an individual’s situation and the problems that they will inevitably face. These vital incidents can also be what fuel the individual to decide their own value of what happiness is in their lives, and in some cases a lack of incentive to achieve this ultimate goal that they had set out
Willa Cather’s short story Paul’s Case represents an character who knew from the very beginning what category he fit in society’s own standards. Paul is a character who ties both his happiness and outlook on life based on the allure of aesthetics as well as riches. Yet, his preferences in life are severely hindered by the reality of Paul’s life in Cordelia street and later come to play a major role in Paul’s gauge of happiness and dissatisfaction which then give him the motivation to make certain decisions that lead him to his untimely suicide
It was a resolve that he had planned "not once. But a hundred times" which he planned to see through to the end. Where Paul had felt dissatisfaction and disgust towards Cordelia Street, the feelings that he comes across while arriving to New York are familiar to the ones that he had felt when he spent his nights at Carnegie Hall, “he was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness”. He was once again among his people and he did not need to explain to others in his choice of clothes amidst people who wore such colors without a care in the world. That what he was experiencing was real and that there was “no figure at the top of the stairs” signifying the end of the night and his paradise. The life that Paul had made for himself in New York despite how short it had been, was what Paul had been constantly searching for in his life back in Pittsburgh. In spite of the fact that Paul had finally been able to achieve his definition of happiness, he knew that what he had made out for himself would soon come to an end and in that realization it was as if “the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over”. It was as if from the very beginning Paul had known that by having once experiencing his fantasy, that there would be no going back from it. Paul would feel the same pain that he had felt every night after returning from the theater and having