Paul’s case is the case of a depressed young man who holds the real world in contempt, yearns for the romantic and the fictional, and stages his own destruction in his pursuit of beauty, finery, and the unreal. It is therefore not surprising that Paul’s one passion in life is opera—fictionalized musical production in which divas and tenors sing in enchanting falsettos. Four particular operas are mentioned in “Paul’s Case”: Faust, Martha, Rigoletto, and Pagliacci. This repertoire, together with the order in which the four operas are presented, is in effect a reflection of the process of Paul’s own gradual destruction.

Near the beginning of the story, when Paul is dismissed from the presence of the school staff, he runs “down the hill whistling the ‘Soldier’s Chorus’ from Faust.” Gounod’s Faust is an opera about discontent leading to destruction. Not content with having read all the books there is to read and gained all the knowledge there is to gain in this world, Faust strikes a bargain with Mephistopheles, exchanging his soul for 24 years of omnipotence. Faust here symbolizes Paul’s discontent with the humdrum and crudeness of the world immediately around him, indicating that given the opportunity, Paul would stop at nothing to “elevate” himself into his “dream world”.

“The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the overture from Martha, or jerked at the serenade from Rigoletto, all stupid and ugly things slid from him.” Both Martha and Rigoletto are operas whose tension is built on changing identities. In Flotow’s Martha, tired of her aristocratic style of life, Lady Henrietta dons a crude outfit and takes up a new identity as a chambermaid. Gilda, in Verdi’s Rigoletto, in order to save the Duke of Mantua, takes up his identity and is killed in his stead. In these two operas, both heroines adopt some sort of disguise, abandoning their present situation in life for a totally opposite one. By putting these two operas in the middle of the story, when Paul has already lied himself into considerable glory as well as trouble, the authoress is actually hinting at Paul’s own burning desire for a change of scene to escape the drab realities of his daily life, at the same time allowing the readers a glimpse of the drastic moves he is about to make.

Pocketing the firm’s three thousand dollars, Paul makes his carefully planned grand entry into New York. Approaching the close of the story, the readers find Paul sitting in his hotel lounge, nervously drumming his fingers to the music of Pagliacci. It is perhaps significant that this happens to be the last opera that Paul will ever hear. Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci is an opera about the devastating consequences of drama turning into reality. Clown Canio, upon discovering that his wife Nedda, who plays the jilting wife opposite his jilted husband in their stage production, is actually cheating on him in real life, stabs her dead during the performance. The fate of Canio and Nedda runs parallel to that of Paul’s—the time when his “fiction” becomes reality is also the time when he crashes into his doom.

Four operas—one about discontent, two about change, and one about the devastating results of fiction’s becoming reality—string up the story of Paul’s miserable life. “It was at the theater and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting.” Only when he is at the opera is Paul really alive—for,  though he himself may not be aware of it, his own life story is in his beloved operas.