Paul

Paul Atreides is a major character in Frank Herbert’s hugely successful sci-fi Dune series. He is a kind of superhuman messiah of the new universal religion who is so deified by his followers that they will go blindly anywhere he leads. He beats overwhelming odds with his extraordinary powers, and eventually ascends to emperor, oppressing all rebellion. Ultimately, he chooses the path of a transformational opting out of his manifest destiny, and lays the way for his son to take his place. Herbert has said that the work was a caveat against our tendency to let someone else do the thinking for us, but when it is someone who looks like a young Kyle McLachlan, that’s all right by us.

Paul is the bad boy of werewolves in Stephanie Meyers’ over-the-top Twilight vampire series. He has a lively temper that has endangered Bella, and he is the sworn enemy of the vampires led by Edward. This propensity toward violence is the cause of his often shifting form from human to wolf. Even though he eventually begins to get his volatility under control, we hope he doesn’t ever do a full 180 degree turn. You know what they say about bad boys – we all love them!

Paul Pennyfeather is the main character in Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, Decline and Fall, published in 1928. This is a rollicking, satirical lampoon of British society in the 1920s, wherein our hapless hero is kicked out of Oxford, which gets him disinherited, which leads to a job as a teacher in a second-rate boys’ school, which gets him engaged to the mother of one of his pupils, which gets him imprisoned for his unwitting involvement in her nefarious doings, and which finally sees him escaped out of prison and restored to a semblance of normalcy. And he is thoroughly likeable throughout all this!

Paul Proteus iIs the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, published in 1952, and excoriating the ills of over-mechanization in the modern world, with its tendency to polarize the classes. Our Paul is caught in the middle, poised for future wealth and success, but torn by a desire to join the rebelling members of society who wish to secure a more humane future. He struggles to ensure the validity of his leanings and to come to terms with the dichotomy between a life of ease and comfort and a life of purpose, and in so doing, plays out a drama that countless others have suffered through.