One of Ours

By Willa Cather

Winner of Pulitzer Prize in novels, 1923.

Claude Wheeler is a Nebraska farm boy right before the start of World War I. Claude is unhappy. He doesn't want to be a farmer. He yearns for something better, higher, more intellectual, exciting and stimulating. He feels estranged from his family. He doesn't really like his dad and his two brothers, they are too crass and materialistic. He loves his mom, but she is a devout Christian and he isn't. He hoped to find a better, more satisfying life when he went to college, but his parents forced him to go to a religious college instead of the state university. He gets a glimpse of the kind of life he is attracted to, but has to go back to the farm at his dad's insistence. Claude throws himself into farming but his heart is not in it. He is depressed and sees no hope for the future and pictures himself as a dead man walking. Then he get sick and a local girl visits him as he lies ill and Claude begins to fall for her. He pictures a life together with her, a life of love, companionship and passion and he asks her to marry him. But as the day draws near, it dawns on him that she is not the passionate, loving creature he fantasized. But he tells himself she'll change: of course, she doesn't. She's a cold fish and that's all she'll ever be. Claude once again sinks into despair and depression; his life is a terrible trap. Plus people keep pronouncing his name wrong: they pronounce it clod. (But how else is it pronounced?) This is a big deal to Claude, it is mentioned several times. It pains him to hear his name pronounced clod but he never tells anyone what the correct pronunciation is. This is the kind of weakling Claude is. He can't even tell people how to pronounce his name!
But guess what? He is saved by WWI! Yay! Let's go be a soldier and fight for what's good and right and splendid! Yes, now Claude feels his life is worth living!
I can understand Claude's idealism and excitement going off to France to see a whole new world. But I pity his naivete.
The part of the story set in Nebraska was more interesting to me than the part in France. I just skimmed the battle scenes as descriptions of fighting bore me. I was pretty sure what Claude's fate would be the minute he stepped on the troop transport ship. It's too bad Cather's hero wasn't man enough to tell his dad to get stuffed and go off to make a life for himself. Instead Claude follows his idealism to its predictable end.

I didn't really care for this novel. Claude is just too big of a pussy for me to admire him. If he had had a little backbone in Nebraska he wouldn't have had to go to war to find himself.

Review from Reading the Pulitzer Prize Winners for Fiction.