Every so often I find myself thinking about Claude Wheeler in Willa Cather’s novel, “One of Ours”.

It happens mostly when my life seems to hit another prolonged lull, or plows full on into a series of roadblocks and whatever momentum I thought I had going is stamped out cold.

I go back to that book because the protagonist, Claude Wheeler, grows up guaranteed a life of comfort due to his heritage and connections, and yet in time finds himself stalled in the mundane obligations of marriage and farming life. Over the years, his wife grows away from him as she becomes more involved in Christian work and activism, which ultimately takes her physically from him, to service work with her sister in China. The comfortable, convenient life his family availed him in time leaves him feeling dull and empty and wishing for something more- for meaning. And then World War I breaks out, and Claude throws everything to the wind and enlists in the army, and, according to Cather, he finds himself. As it is said by an author on Wikipedia, “A romantic unfulfilled by marriage and an idealist without an ideal to cling to, Wheeler fulfills his romantic idealism on the brutal battlefields of 1918 France.”

Cather’s book, published in 1922, won her a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1923. Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken, and Hemingway challenged it critically, particularly her efforts at creating war drama, and others found offense in what appeared was a work glamorizing and validating events in the Great War. Still, the book was received with public warmth and acclaim.

In Claude Wheeler, though, I think Cather created a character that found sympathies with men of that day, and would undoubtedly also sit well with many men of today, because Wheeler represents a man made for frontier living in a land without frontiers. Wheeler’s obligations to family, marriage, business, and civic duties were fulfilled, but his daily life left him feeling empty of motivation and meaning. And with his wife’s psychological and emotional (not to mention physical) absence, Claude was stuck going through the motions.

Until the war started.

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I think of that book and Claude Wheeler because at a particular moment in his story, Claude makes a break from it all.

Raised under particular expectations, living his life as a pleaser, striving to be a person of value, he finds himself in midlife alone and deeply dissatisfied, the “comfortable life” he was supposed to pursue revealed as droll and meaningless, and his marriage lifeless and superficial.

And in time, instead of staying in the semi-consciousness that he knows, he musters courage and chooses to change his life course, exchanging comfort for combat and convenience for camaraderie- and ultimately, mollification for meaning.

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I am sure the book is not a sanction for every man in midlife crisis to go off and join an army to fight a foreign war. Cather aptly captures, though, a great pitfall faced by many in midife: potential loss of meaning and motivation. It’s important to have passions and pursuits that drive us. Those passions and pursuits give us meaning.

As the years rack up, there is a danger for some, though, in the face of expectations and obligations, in the face of comforts and conveniences and coercions and commitments, to lose their way and never meet their meaning.

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Every so often I find myself thinking about Claude Wheeler in Willa Cather’s novel, “One of Ours”.