In "Paul's Case," is Paul a static or dynamic character?

In Willa Cather’s story, Paul is a dynamic character. He is a teenager who is experiencing numerous developmental issues that are compounded by his personal situation.

Cather shows the changes that Paul undergoes in part through his physical relocation to another city. While the boy is an outsider with artistic interests, when “Paul’s Case” begins, the reader has no reason to believe that he is anything other than an honest, straightforward person. The alienation he experiences at school environment propels him to seek another environment where he feels more comfortable—the theater.

During the course of the story, however, we see Paul’s behavior change for the worse: he steals money to finance his escape and lies about being wealthy. No real clues are presented earlier to indicate he was suicidal, but at the end, apparently driven by fear, he takes his own life.

In "Paul's Case," is Paul a static or dynamic character?

Paul is a very dynamic, complex character, so much so that this story is often studied from a psychoanalytical point of view in an attempt to understand this child’s problem. He neither dresses nor acts like a normal child his age, as we see in the first paragraph when he walks into the principal’s office “suave and smiling” dressed in clothes too fancy yet not fitting him properly: he had outgrown them. Such is Paul, in fact, for he fits into nothing at all, except the world of the theater, which is his “fairy tale.” The narrator explains that “in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness [so] that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty.” This is because he doesn’t feel he fits in, and also because his father wants him to be more, different--a typical, successful young man. The more he goes to the theater (where he is an usher), the more hateful school becomes. Finally, his father pulls him out of school, he is refused entrance to the theater, he is forced to get a job, but then he runs away from everything. In the end, he kills himself by throwing himself onto a train, a rather gruesome ending, but for him a way to drop “into the immense design of things” and escape forever the mundane world. Dynamic character? Yes, I think so, for his state of mind deteriorates significantly from the beginning to the end.

Is Paul in "Paul's Case" a static or a developing character? If developing, when does he change?

I would argue that Paul is a static character in that he doesn't really change throughout the course of the story. From first to last, he remains trapped in a fantasy world of his own making. He's obsessed with leading the kind of opulent lifestyle of the Pittsburgh social elite he so much admires. But he's unwilling to do anything practical that might actually make his dreams of wealth and comfort come true. He much prefers the easier option of stealing money from his employer. After this, he runs off to New York, where he briefly indulges his fantasy of living as a wealthy young man about town.

Although Paul is in a different city and living a completely different lifestyle, his character hasn't really changed. He's still an incorrigible fantasist, living in the same old fantasy world. And even his final epiphany, as he stands by the railroad track ready to end his own life, doesn't represent a change of character as such. He's still a hopeless fantasist; it's just that now he realizes that, with all his money gone, and with the police on his tail, all hopes of living out his fantasies have now been well and truly dashed.

Is Paul in "Paul's Case" a static or a developing character? If developing, when does he change?

Considering that the character of Paul in Willa Cather's Paul's Case is, as the whole title states A Study in Temperament, it is implied that his behavior has either changed all of a sudden, or has changed and remained in a certain manner. This manner is what serves as the focus of the study.

We know that Paul is a misfit. He cannot adapt to his surroundings and has lived his life in denial of his reality. The story does not readily tell us when exactly Paul's dissatisfaction with life begins, but it is arguable that this is a gradual change that only gets more and more intense. So intense, indeed, that it ends with Paul's suicide.

This being said, Paul arguably is a dynamic character because he changes with his circumstances. Since Paul's case is so unique, however, we can see that the changes occur within a very defined scenario from Cordelia Street to the Waldorf Astoria: The transformation from Paul, the private school boy, into Paul, the dandy.