The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford is a wonderful piece of literature focused around an unreliable narrator recalling the events that transpired out of order. The story isn’t so much fragmentary as it tells blocks of the previous events, but not in linear order.

The story is about two couples, John Dowell and his new wife, Florence and their friendship with an English couple, Edward and Lenora Ashburnham, and the secret affair that Florence engages in with Edward for nine years behind John’s back without him noticing, only to end with suicide. John acts as a male nurse to his wife Florence who fakes having a heart condition in order to engage in affairs with other men. The narrative also explores Edward’s other illicit liaisons with women and its effect on his relationship with Lenora. All of which culminates in Edward longing for his wife’s ward, Nancy, and committing suicide when he realizes even he cannot cross a certain line of proper social boundaries and sends her away to India. Dowell tells the events out-of-order, hoping to make sense of it all, trying to understand how the inner secret lives of these various characters contrast so much with their outer social appearance as happy couples. The out-of-order narrative highlights the destruction of an orderly world for Dowell who has come to realize his world that he always lived in is not what it seems once you get beyond the surface appearance of things.

For most people the greatest hindrance to appreciating the novel is the pathetic naïve nature of Dowell who went nine years without knowing his wife was having an affair behind his back, and as the narrative implies, never had sex with her himself all the years they were married. Johnny Virus over at Blogging the Canon disliked the book because he found the narrator, John Dowell, to be a complete idiot. Personally I thought the book was wonderful and found the narrator sympathetic, despite his emasculation, impotence, and idiocy.

Florence emasculates Dowell by transforming him into a male nurse. Likewise, Edward feels emasculated by Lenora when she takes over his business affairs because he runs up debt engaging in his affairs and is too lenient a landowner with his tenants. The narrative questions the idea of ever having true of knowledge of the world. John Dowell thought he understood the world by noticing the surface appearance of things, but learns from the events of the novel the error of his ways. The world isn’t orderly, but chaotic. An entire secret inner world exists beyond external appearances. It calls into question the possibility of ever truly knowing other people.

Dowell tells us it is a sad story because nobody ends up getting what they wanted.

“Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney Bayham, a pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn’t really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.”

Although nothing resembling garden imagery is presented in the above quote, every time I read it, my mind conjures up the Garden of Eden story from the Bible. The themes are parallel. God created the Garden as a terrestrial paradise with everything a person could possibly want in it, but discontent humanity chooses to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge that is the advent of society and the beginning of their woes. The connection to this ancient narrative implies that human beings chose their own suffering and not to be happy for the sake of society and knowledge. It’s no coincidence that a large part of the narrative is about the superficial appearances of society and proper decorum, and the difficulty of discerning true knowledge about people given these false appearances.  Dowell follows this line in the text by explicitly mentioning a “terrestrial paradise” that further supports a connection to the Garden of Eden narrative.

“Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?”

In the narrative, the idea of heaven and hell is a leitmotif. Dowell tells us that Lenora in her Catholic exuberance constantly speaks of this character or that character going to hell for their sins and social transgressions. By the end of the narrative, she purposefully tries to make a hell of Edward’s life as revenge for all the years he made a hell of her life.

As the narrative progresses, the naïve and idiotic Dowell grows increasingly wise in his insight into events. The novel suggests rules and decorum imprisons our secret inner lives, but allows society and civilization to flourish into the future. We make our own hell by sticking to the rules of society and our religions instead of following our hearts. Lorena’s adherence to strict Catholic beliefs prevents her from divorcing Edward for his transgression and forces her to rationalize his sexual flings. Dowell himself admiring Edward’s sentimentality rationalizes Edward’s behavior.

Edward’s problem is much like Madame Bovary’s problem. He reads too many novels with a romantic view of life and sexual relationships. It gives him a false expectation of relations. Like Bovary, he spends ridiculous amounts of money, even to the point of putting himself in major debt, to have an affair with Dolciquita, a grand duke’s mistress. He wants women to be of the medieval type, needing men to protect them from the horrors of the world. This is why he never really hits off with Lenora who is controlling, manipulative, and self-sufficient. Seen from another viewpoint, she is capable, managing his estates better than he ever could himself. Lenora is manipulative and controlling because she thinks by putting his affairs right and accepting his lovers that is what will bring Edward back to her (for being the capable and understanding wife), but it’s precisely these qualities that Dowell tells us drives Edward away from her. the other hand, because Dowell is unreliable, a naïve idiot, and tends to romanticize Edward’s behavior throughout the narrative. One wonders if in fact these are mere excuses for his behavior; Edward might simply be someone who likes to sleep around and gets bored being only with one woman for too long, not because he reads too many romantic novels and cannot stand Lenora. The narrative hints, or Lenora does anyway, that even if Edward had married someone else, such as Nancy, he would eventually lose interest and sleep around with someone else. It is easy to notice the fact that Dowell as narrator is unreliable, but it’s also important to remember the other characters who give Dowell his information are just as unreliable. In fact, the whole point is that Dowell has difficulty noticing things beyond surface appearance. He receives much of his information that he relays throughout the narrative from Lenora. How do we know she’s not lying? How do we know she isn’t mistaken?  Dowell at one point mentions that we cannot even be sure of our own motives. Lenora at various points, according to Dowell, wants to reconcile with her husband, and at other points, absolutely loathes him. Dowell for most of the narrative refers to his cheating ex-wife as “poor Florence” and even tells us he would lay down his life for her, despite her indiscretions, but at other points in the book talks about her bitterly and contradicts these statements. Human beings are fickle creatures, full of constantly changing emotions and contradictory perspectives. Given this fact, how can we ever know the truth about other people, when they don’t know the truth about themselves, How can we ever pin down the truth of others when we ourselves aren’t sure how we truly feel about them since we might feel one way one day and very differently the next?

 

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