Ford’s The Good Soldier and the Unreliable Narrator

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