Ford’s The Good Soldier and the Unreliable Narrator

Abstract

The Good Soldier is Ford’s masterpiece, distinguished by its technical virtuosity, its Jamesian
indirection, and its air of fissure and tension. Initially entitledThe Saddest Story it first appeared
in Wyndham Lewis’sBlast, the mouthpiece of the English Vorticist movement. The summer that
the first instalment ofThe Good Soldier appeared in Blast, Ford published an important
theoretical essay in the journalPoetry and Drama titled ‘On Impressionism’ which explains in
detail Ford’s theoretical precepts regarding Impressionism. This novel written during the same
time is deeply entrenched with Ford’s Impressionist ideals of novel-writing. The feature that
makesThe Good Soldier so interesting to us is the use of an unreliable narrator as its primary
narrator. By choosing as his narrator John Dowell, Ford turns the entire narrative into a maze of
false clues, misinterpretations, and unanswered contradictions. There is hence a shift from
nineteenth century certainty to modernist disorientation through Dowell’s increasingly
untrustworthy narration. These uncertainties become even more acute when Dowell turns from
the attempt to understand others and tries to understand himself. Dowell tries to process his
sense-impressions, interpret it subjectively, before passing it on to his reader. This is where
Dowell faces problems and becomes the famous Impressionist (and Modernist) feature, an
‘unreliable narrator’.