What techniques does the author use to establish the reader's sympathy for Paul? "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather

Willa Cather's most powerful technique for developing
Paul as a character is direct exposition as an authorial voice that presents information
about Paul to the reader in thorough detail. With this authoritative narrator, every
aspect of Paul's exterior and inner reality is portrayed and analyzed. for the reader.
Through this voice of Cather, the reader perceives the poignant yearning after the arts
and their beauty that is innate to the motherless Paul.  In addition, the reader also
realizes Paul's disengagement from reality, a detachment that effects his destruction
since he cannot conceive of having any choice but that of living in the
arts.

In the exposition of the story, Cather describes Paul
as having large pupils "as though he were addicted to belladonna."  When he is called to
the principal's office, he is accused of disorder and disobedience, but after the
meeting, the reader's sympathy is aroused for Paul when the teachers are ashamed of
their accusations, especially when the drawing master

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voiced the feeling of them all when he declared
there was something about the boy which none of them understood.  He added:  'I don't
really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort
of haunted about it.  The boy is not strong for one thing.  There is something wrong
about the fellow.'

After he
says this, his teachers feel somewhat like bullies, 

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dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to have
felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling in cutting terms, and
to have se each other one, as it were, in the gruesome game of intermperate reproach. 
One of them remembered having seen a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of
tormentors.

That Paul is so
elated when surrounded by beauty and art and so terribly unhappy and "irritable" in the
grey environment of the material world, touches the sympathies of the reader, as well.  
As he stands outside the concert hall, Paul's thoughts are
these:

There
it was, what he wanted--tanglibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always
to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at
it.

Cather's repeated mention
of Paul's aversion to the mundane and his touching yearning for the aesthetic that
provides him an "indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his
senses" makes Paul's death all the more poignant.  In fact, the ambiguous
ending--whether Paul's death is an accident or a suicide--also gives the reader a sense
of Paul's victimization as part of "the immense design of
things."