The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford is a current model for couples, a complexly worked novel that unravels the demise of two pairs who meet by chance while travelling in Europe. John Dowell, a prosperous American and the narrator of the tale, cares for his wife Florence, whom has been diagnosed with a heart condition, making sure that she does not fall victim to over-excitement. When the pair come across Edward and Leonora Ashburnham; a wealthy English couple. Edward is, in Dowell point of view, an astounding physical example and somewhat of a sentimentalist, while Leonora is more understanding than her husband. Covering the polished surface of the wealthy couples lurks real people with real faults, full of absurdities and unable to match up …show more content…
As he transmits the events that form the lives of the characters, aspects of the story are subtly pulled apart, rehashed, and reinterpreted. The novel journeys the association between certainty and perspective, truth and appearance, and how reality is in the eye of the beholder, no matter how he must distort the facts to reach his decision. Whether Dowell is trustworthy or not, and to what end he was aware of his position as cuckold is completely crucial to the diverse readings of the novel. In reality, only a close reading can begin to pick these difficulties apart, he emerges a narrator easily succumb to self-delusion, maybe to shield himself from the forbidding truth of the facts, but undoubtedly unreliable to some degree as his reflecting statements in the book attest. Ford works the narrative gorgeously, using ironic sentences frequently, Dowell obscuring the truth, often through his own faults, while Ford reveals …show more content…
That he decides to spin his story in this way picks it out very distinctly as an fake form of authenticity, and this ties the formulation of the plot into a debate of not just Dowell’s own side of the story but of storytelling method. Ashburnham cannot alter a story, while the men whom Dowell and himself blend with on their voyages in Europe turn lewd after-dinner tales; Edward remains quiet, incapable or lacking the will to participate. In the case of both men, the ability to express a narrative forms a barrier to information; for Dowell this is the understanding of the facts he has obtainable to him over the time period of his wife’s affair and beyond, but for Edward it is simply just self-knowledge, the wealthy inner life that might save him from his ultimate