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3.47 AVERAGE
3.47 AVERAGE
I got within spitting distance of page 50 and decided I didn't want to use my limited reading time on this. I can't stand the narrator, and the writing is pretty awful - I think the phrase "poor dear" wife or wife's name was used at least ten times in the these pages.
adventurous
relaxing
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Unreliable narrators are a dime a dozen these days, to the extent that they’ve become cliche. (That’s not to say it can’t be done well. Everything old and worn can be renewed). In the days of Ford Maddox Ford, the unreliable narrator was a narrative device you didn’t often see used in mimetic fiction.* But FMF (yes, I’m calling him that) wasn’t just interested in a narrator you couldn’t trust (does John Dowell ever actually lie, or does he elide?), he also employed what he called “impressionistic techniques”, to imitate the non-linear quality of memory. So, what we get is a decidedly untrustworthy narrator telling us a story out of order about infidelity, tragedy and death. And it’s awesome!
Set before Dub Dub 1**, Americans John Dowell and his wife Florence meet English couple the Ashburnhams, Captain Edward and Leonora, at a spa in Nauheim, Germany. The Dowells are there because Florence has heart problems and they’re seeking treatment. The couples form a friendship, one that will last nine years. But, we know going in that their relationship will end in tears — as Dowell tells us, this is the “saddest story I have ever heard” (“The Saddest Story” was the novel’s original title). We also know that by story’s end, Edward and Florence will be dead. This isn’t a spoiler. Dowell is keen we know this straight off the mark. So armed with all this foreshadowing, we’re expecting a sorrowful story about a friendship sundered by tragedy. But that’s not what we get. Instead, as the narrative unfurls out of order, we discover that no one, not least John Dowell, can be trusted.
The Good Soldier is a short novel, but it’s dense. There’s a scant amount of dialogue but rather long, descriptive paragraphs, each one a testament to Dowell’s slippery state of mind. At first, he comes off as gormless, duped by his wife Florence, who married him as a cover for an affair she was having with a “lower class” man (class plays a significant role in the story – especially the horror of having an affair with a man or woman of low standing). But the further we go, the more we start to doubt Dowell’s temperament, given glimpses of his cruelty and savagery. It leaves us to wonder whether he killed his wife (of course he bloody well did) and whether he manipulated Edward to take his own life (errrrr, yes!).
I did chuckle at an early review of The Good Soldier which suggested FMF would have been better served, for the sake of clarity, to tell his story chronologically. How else is a reader meant to figure out whether Dowell is a lovely, simple-minded bloke or an evil, violent bastard? Even now, with the publishing world glutted with unreliable, prickish characters, The Good Soldier maintains a freshness that more contemporary works struggle to match. I’ve read some tremendous “older” novels this year, but The Good Solider would be at the top of the pile. It’s just that good.
*Go on, provide your examples, but they must predate 1915 and be mimetic… horror and crime don’t count! Neither does Chaucer! OK, you can have Chaucer.
** Because there was no War when FMF drafted the novel. Also, while “The Good Soldier” wasn’t his choice the title certainly didn’t hurt sales when it came out in 1915.
Set before Dub Dub 1**, Americans John Dowell and his wife Florence meet English couple the Ashburnhams, Captain Edward and Leonora, at a spa in Nauheim, Germany. The Dowells are there because Florence has heart problems and they’re seeking treatment. The couples form a friendship, one that will last nine years. But, we know going in that their relationship will end in tears — as Dowell tells us, this is the “saddest story I have ever heard” (“The Saddest Story” was the novel’s original title). We also know that by story’s end, Edward and Florence will be dead. This isn’t a spoiler. Dowell is keen we know this straight off the mark. So armed with all this foreshadowing, we’re expecting a sorrowful story about a friendship sundered by tragedy. But that’s not what we get. Instead, as the narrative unfurls out of order, we discover that no one, not least John Dowell, can be trusted.
The Good Soldier is a short novel, but it’s dense. There’s a scant amount of dialogue but rather long, descriptive paragraphs, each one a testament to Dowell’s slippery state of mind. At first, he comes off as gormless, duped by his wife Florence, who married him as a cover for an affair she was having with a “lower class” man (class plays a significant role in the story – especially the horror of having an affair with a man or woman of low standing). But the further we go, the more we start to doubt Dowell’s temperament, given glimpses of his cruelty and savagery. It leaves us to wonder whether he killed his wife (of course he bloody well did) and whether he manipulated Edward to take his own life (errrrr, yes!).
I did chuckle at an early review of The Good Soldier which suggested FMF would have been better served, for the sake of clarity, to tell his story chronologically. How else is a reader meant to figure out whether Dowell is a lovely, simple-minded bloke or an evil, violent bastard? Even now, with the publishing world glutted with unreliable, prickish characters, The Good Soldier maintains a freshness that more contemporary works struggle to match. I’ve read some tremendous “older” novels this year, but The Good Solider would be at the top of the pile. It’s just that good.
*Go on, provide your examples, but they must predate 1915 and be mimetic… horror and crime don’t count! Neither does Chaucer! OK, you can have Chaucer.
** Because there was no War when FMF drafted the novel. Also, while “The Good Soldier” wasn’t his choice the title certainly didn’t hurt sales when it came out in 1915.
Here is the novel that begins with the famous sentence: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Set in pre-WWI, the novel was originally title "The Saddest Story" but the publisher demanded a change and Ford, sarcastically, suggested "The Good Soldier," which they accepted. The Modern Library ranked "The Good Soldier" 30th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and it is a fine novel, though it is of an earlier day and time. The sad story is told by the character John Dowell, an unreliable narrator who does not tell his story of deceptions and infidelities chronologically. Nothing is what it seems as John spins his story of the deaths of three characters and the madness of a fourth. Perhaps not for everyone but a fine piece of writing.
A technical masterpiece. My greatest joy in reading the book was in analyzing Ford's narrative technique.
Essay on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solidier
By Jeffrey Mays
Tipped off by the introduction by Mark Schorer, one understandable first thought about the book is to question the reliability of the narrator John Dowell. In the opening chapters the reader has a looming sense that the eminently upper-class British propriety of Edward and Lenora, and the just-as-polished upper-class manners of their American friends John and Florence, is hiding some truth. The narrator jumps from relating the delightfulness of the Ashburnhams, how they were good people, their pleasure of their friendship, their travels, the “minuet” that their intimacy was, to shrieking “No, by God, it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison – a prison full of screaming hysterics,” and then immediately back to “And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine, the true music, the true plash of fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins.” The reader gets the distinct sense that beneath the reserved and formal exterior lies a freak show, and narrator John Dowell himself is suspect in the truthfulness of his tale.
But the second question that might occur to the reader, multiple times over the next two hundred pages, is “Can this possibly be real? Can there be any resemblance between this story and the high culture of turn of the century British?” When literary critics relate that Ford saw novelists as a historians of their own time, we must conclude that betrayal, fornications, blackmails, and hatred must have been pervasive in the time Ford was writing, to say nothing of today.
There are many themes that can be explored in The Good Soldier: the number of characters who have heart problems. Edward Ashburnham, Florence Dowell, Maisie Maiden and Florence’s Uncle Hurlbird all had heart trouble. Also, how August 4th was the significant day for many events in Florence’s life. How the completeness of each character’s social programming rendered them, with the exception of Leonora thanks to her Catholic upbringing, shockingly oblivious to their own culpability. It is truly staggering how oblivious Edward is to his own actions, his torture of Leonora, and his serial infidelity, his complete self-deception that it was often all an Uncle or patron’s desire to aid and comfort a needy soul. Edward’s sentimentality is perhaps the main theme, and the namesake of the book, titled by Ford himself “The Saddest Story” and then ironically renamed The Good Solider.
Ford’s original title, The Saddest Story, is taken from the narrators repeated statement that this was the saddest story he ever heard. Some suggestion is made that the narrator is referring, in his own emotionally confused way, to the plight of Edward, whom he never charges with guilt, but strenuously defends with explanations as to his upbringing, nature and good intentions. But to me, the bitterest sadness of the story was Leonora’s attitude toward Edward – the naïve hope that he would return to her and love her after one more fling, and that she will be triumphant, showing that her silence and patience and even facilitation of the affairs won the day, and also that in her, the Catholic Church would be triumphant.
This book was one of the easiest books to read, though I am not sure why. The slow pacing of the book, and the limitation of having only the narrator’s point of view might have made it tiresome. But I enjoyed the book immensely for many reasons: the sympathetic though unreliable narrator keeps the reader in a constant state of scrutiny as to the reality of what he’s relating; the sheer newness of the idea to me of the putrefaction underlying the gentle manners, patience and understatedness of the British aristocracy; and perhaps most of all, the clarity and intimacy with which the reader comes to know the characters – this makes the whole book feel like an excursion into depths of human brokenness, and even more to the point, that the story successfully tells us something true about human nature and community.
By Jeffrey Mays
Tipped off by the introduction by Mark Schorer, one understandable first thought about the book is to question the reliability of the narrator John Dowell. In the opening chapters the reader has a looming sense that the eminently upper-class British propriety of Edward and Lenora, and the just-as-polished upper-class manners of their American friends John and Florence, is hiding some truth. The narrator jumps from relating the delightfulness of the Ashburnhams, how they were good people, their pleasure of their friendship, their travels, the “minuet” that their intimacy was, to shrieking “No, by God, it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison – a prison full of screaming hysterics,” and then immediately back to “And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine, the true music, the true plash of fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins.” The reader gets the distinct sense that beneath the reserved and formal exterior lies a freak show, and narrator John Dowell himself is suspect in the truthfulness of his tale.
But the second question that might occur to the reader, multiple times over the next two hundred pages, is “Can this possibly be real? Can there be any resemblance between this story and the high culture of turn of the century British?” When literary critics relate that Ford saw novelists as a historians of their own time, we must conclude that betrayal, fornications, blackmails, and hatred must have been pervasive in the time Ford was writing, to say nothing of today.
There are many themes that can be explored in The Good Soldier: the number of characters who have heart problems. Edward Ashburnham, Florence Dowell, Maisie Maiden and Florence’s Uncle Hurlbird all had heart trouble. Also, how August 4th was the significant day for many events in Florence’s life. How the completeness of each character’s social programming rendered them, with the exception of Leonora thanks to her Catholic upbringing, shockingly oblivious to their own culpability. It is truly staggering how oblivious Edward is to his own actions, his torture of Leonora, and his serial infidelity, his complete self-deception that it was often all an Uncle or patron’s desire to aid and comfort a needy soul. Edward’s sentimentality is perhaps the main theme, and the namesake of the book, titled by Ford himself “The Saddest Story” and then ironically renamed The Good Solider.
Ford’s original title, The Saddest Story, is taken from the narrators repeated statement that this was the saddest story he ever heard. Some suggestion is made that the narrator is referring, in his own emotionally confused way, to the plight of Edward, whom he never charges with guilt, but strenuously defends with explanations as to his upbringing, nature and good intentions. But to me, the bitterest sadness of the story was Leonora’s attitude toward Edward – the naïve hope that he would return to her and love her after one more fling, and that she will be triumphant, showing that her silence and patience and even facilitation of the affairs won the day, and also that in her, the Catholic Church would be triumphant.
This book was one of the easiest books to read, though I am not sure why. The slow pacing of the book, and the limitation of having only the narrator’s point of view might have made it tiresome. But I enjoyed the book immensely for many reasons: the sympathetic though unreliable narrator keeps the reader in a constant state of scrutiny as to the reality of what he’s relating; the sheer newness of the idea to me of the putrefaction underlying the gentle manners, patience and understatedness of the British aristocracy; and perhaps most of all, the clarity and intimacy with which the reader comes to know the characters – this makes the whole book feel like an excursion into depths of human brokenness, and even more to the point, that the story successfully tells us something true about human nature and community.
A very strange and unique book. I wonder if Fitzgerald read it, because it shares a few important qualities with THE GREAT GATSBY: a) a "merely spectating" first person narrator; b) a chopped-and-channelled chronology; c) a morally ambiguous "hero"; d) a dispirited tone seemingly conjured by society's conventional thinking; and e) a light strain of misogyny. It is FAR, FAR less romantic than GATSBY. I liked it, but Ford's narrator Dowell lingers and lingers and lingers on matters to the point of reader frustration. To an extent, the final 25 pages justify it.
Was very captivated by this. I kinda want to re-read it again immediately.
3.75
this was so interesting it did feel like a slightly worse edith wharton novel tho but as books on the uni syllabus go this was pretty slay, queer theory being applied to this and put into an essay as soon as the academic year starts oh i love being an english student
this was so interesting it did feel like a slightly worse edith wharton novel tho but as books on the uni syllabus go this was pretty slay, queer theory being applied to this and put into an essay as soon as the academic year starts oh i love being an english student
What a let-down, I thought I'd love this but I didn't at all. This is meant to be amazing! It didn't hit for me.