As a coming of age story, One of Ours details Claude’s maturation into adulthood and into manhood. Over the course of the novel, he evolves from a self-doubting, self-loathing young man who feels ill at ease within his surroundings—like he has never been “one of ours”—to a self-confident and capable soldier fighting in a struggle that’s larger than him.

Claude often grapples with male identity, male behavior, and what makes a man “manly.” As a hybrid of Cather’s cousin, Grosvenor Cather, and Cather’s own traits, Claude also uniquely combines the lived experiences of a man with the analytical perspective of a woman. Thus, Claude embodies both a man’s reflections on American masculinity and meaning-making, and a woman’s deconstruction of American masculinity from the outside in.

Throughout the novel, Claude doesn’t equate manliness with brawniness, physical strength, or other stereotypically masculine characteristics so much as bravery and willingness to do the right thing, even when it is challenging. Early on, he judges overly religious people, such as Brother Weldon, to be “unmanly” because they use faith to recuse themselves from challenging philosophical questions. Likewise, Claude evolves in his own notions of manliness as he attends the Erlich family’s European-style salons and works through his own overly narrow ideas of masculine behavior.