February 4, 2013
Discovering the Pertinence of Narrative Framing in The Good Soldier

Trying to read Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier directly is equivocal to squinting harder-and harder at a fine Monet painting in the vain hope of arriving at a substantial understanding of his stylistic genius.  Obviously, the chance of the daubs of paint giving any particularly illuminating insight will remain highly unlikely.  They will remain dubious constituents of a remarkable whole.  Likewise, the attempt to directly correlate particular passages in The Good Soldier to matter-of-fact analysis  may prove troublesome as well; the logical design of the work discourages a normative reading.  The logical design of The Good Soldier depends on a complex and unorthodox sequence of frames which influence how the narrative itself may be interpreted.  We ought to state a few fundamentals about the text.  First, we are reading a non-chronological reconstruction of events from a man named John Dowell.  Second, all observations, opinions, and conclusions have been filtered through the senses of this man.  Thirdly, the ostensible agenda undertaken by this man is to reconstruct a period of his life involving Florence Dowell, Edward Ashburnham, and Leonora Ashburnham.  Lastly, the narrator is simultaneously a self-conscious character of the work he seeks to create.  This last quality requires the deployment of a reflective first person voice which is present throughout the work.  Treated carefully, I believe the exploration of these logical features will allow a clear sentiment to emerge.  Namely, I posit that an impressionist lesson is embedded within the The Good Soldier.  However, the reader must comprehend the complex layered narrative structure before the lesson may be learned.


Ford Madox Ford establishes John Dowell, the sole narrator, as clearly unreliable.  As such, the reader is tasked with the responsibility of determining the extent of the unreliability.  By his own admission, “Nine years and six weeks [of John Dowell’s life] vanished in four crashing days” (Ford 11).  For nearly a decade, the sensibilities of John Dowell had remained arrested and deceived.  He waxes philosophically for a moment, “If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?” (12).  If the only property being evaluated is skin-deep, then perhaps John Dowell has a point.  Alas, one would like to think otherwise.  An unignorable and glaring feature, the reader is forced to take severe implications into account quite early in the narrative.  Either the external forces holding John Dowell sway must been of a particularly cunning sort or he is a fool.  Ford places our judgment in suspension.  Use of such suspension is an early indicator that we may need to look in unorthodox places for a firmer foundation of understanding.

The quickness with which Ford deploys this conflicting impressions thus inducing our suspension of judgement should not go unnoticed.  In “On Impressionism” Ford urges writers to “always consider that the first impression with which you present him will be so strong that it will be all that you can ever do to efface it” (III. 8).  Applying this advice to The Good Soldier, seems peculiar at first but revelatory after initial consideration.  With such conviction that early details are endowed with greater impact, Ford selects uncertainty as John Dowell’s modus operandi.  The narrative is rife with questions asking whether “is all this digression or isn’t it digression?” (17) John Dowell answers seemingly every question with “again I don’t know” (17).  A mental ellipsis hangs loosely over the silhouette of John Dowell, approaching and retreating from clarity as the novel continues.  Because we are reserving varying portions of our judgement, we are denied the occasion to appropriate the whole arsenal of our emotions onto our initial glimpse of John Dowell. At the same time, due to human nature, we are also forced to take some apprehensive gambits.  If we are to stay in line with the advice of “On Impressionism” with the actual structure of The Good Soldier, we arrive at an important conclusion: John Dowell’s indecisive opinions and ambiguous narration is hinting at the subject, pointing us along the right path.

In addition to a less-than-robust confidence in his narration, the motives for furthering the plot seem to self-implode as the novel progresses.  If we are charitable and not unwarrantedly suspicious, let us take John Dowell as an honest agent in an unfortunate circumstance: an honest agent who feels a moral imperative to document the deception in hopes of gaining greater insight into the overall incident. In short, the tale of the victim.  Because such an estimation would provide us with an honest impetus for the creation of the text it seems to serve a reassuring purpose to the reader as well. If we are to keep our logical expectations intact, we must now expect John Dowell to elaborate on the external forces which kept him deceived for so long.  Naturally some agency must be culpable for the deception.  If not, the incompetence of John Dowell’s senses must be held accountable.  Outing the perpetrators, vilifying their amorality, gaining some sympathy – from a god-fearing listener – all of these are well established features of the victim tale trope.  When John Dowell recounts “bursting out crying… for the whole eleven miles” (13) we are certainly prepared to sympathize with the man.  A regular man, we assume, must have experienced quite a crafty and horrible betrayal to be brought to tears for so long.  But our cathartic tension is never relieved, we are never able to swiftly condemn any subject as morally abominable.  For his cheating spouse, Dowell reassures us that he does not “blame Florence” (12).  In fact, in regards to both Edward and Florence he states, “I do not believe that I would have separated those two if I had known that they really and passionately loved each other” (67).  For a victim trope, this is blasphemous! This acknowledgement constitutes a shocking castration of the very motivating forces which give the genre life.  Because the victim trope paradigm does not satisfy our expectations, we can no longer read The Good Soldier in such a manner.  Essentially, John Dowell shoulders us with a problem we can only resolve by looking outside the boundaries of the genre.

Thus, our attention is inevitably redirected back to the ambiguity-as-subject premise. The novel opens with the lines, “this is the saddest story I have ever heard” (9).  Heard is a curious verb choice given the fact that John Dowell is recounting a tale based on his own experience.  The reason the story is heard for John Dowell as opposed to experienced results from a severe fracture paid only subtle attention..  If we pay closer attention to the fracture we realize that there exists a fundamental discord between the events John Dowell has experienced and the events he wishes to express to the reader.  “Til today… I knew nothing whatever” (9) about the events which he himself has experienced.  Til today, is important in that it highlights a distinct feature of the work.  The feature of the dynamic – as opposed to conventionally static – present frame which constantly disrupts the cohesiveness of the past frame.  John Dowell is reconciling with the events he perceived but now understands under drastically different terms due to an external character.  In actuality, there exist three temporal states within The Good Soldier: the present time of creating this text under a recently enlightened pretext; the interim of time between the suicide of Florence and redefined understanding of events; and the static past of John Dowell’s unenlightened memory of an idyllic time spent with Edward, Leonora, and Florence.  All three of these temporal settings are interwoven into the progression of the story and often undermine the credibility of John Dowell.  Yet, the weirdest aspect of the present tense is that it refuses to remain in a suspended omnitemporal setting.  When he admits “I am writing this now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the words that end my last chapter” (155), the present is realized to correlate with an actual timeline.  Likewise, when he writes “[s]ix months ago, I had never been to England” (9) we may infer that the present also correlates with a physical space.  Also, with that temporal admission, the opinions held by John Dowell in the beginning may be different than those held now.  As a result, one may observe Ford intricately carving a setting of realized time and space in which his narrative character has room to showcase his true nature directly to the reader.  The invention of a dynamic evolving narrator, who is attempting to mash several perspectives into one cohesive narrative of events he himself has participated – but failed to understand – is the crux to comprehending The Good Soldier as an impressionist text.  

Impressions are the most substantial subject in The Good Soldier.  The experimental form complements the particular subject well. There exists a cacophony of competing impressions in the mind of John Dowell: those imparted and those experienced.  Of those experienced, he relays easily to the reader.  Of those imparted, however, he becomes fidgety and scrupulous.  In these states of anxiety, he breaks with the suspension of belief and writes in his realized present.  He cannot adopt the impressions of others without feeling “horribly alone” (12) as a result.  With such a meta-cognitive subject confounded by distress, the necessity of the experimental dynamic frame becomes perfect.  With too straight-forward of a presentation, much of the nuance of John Dowell’s brain would remain eclipsed by simple confusion.  In the end, The Good Soldier is a document which simulates the trial of man in the throes of an epiphanic terror: a terror induced and revealed by a steadily progressive realized time in which he creates the work.  Thus, impressionist labelling of The Good Soldier becomes more clear.  John Dowell seeks to replicate the truest form of the human experience: an experience marked by perpetual and progressive revisions of fleeting impressions after fleeting impressions.

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