Ford Madox Ford: Structure and Impressionism in His Fiction

Introduction

As Graham Greene once wrote on the subject of Ford Madox Ford, "No one in our century except James has been more attentive to the craft of letters. He was not only a designer; he was a carpenter: you feel in his work the love of the tools and the love of the material" (Greene 1962, p. 8). In what follows, we explore the ways in which Ford both designed and engineered what are perhaps his two greatest novels, The Good Soldier and Parade's End. Through a rigorous analysis of both the formal and textual aspects of Ford's work, we hope to expose those qualities that contributed to Ford's development as one of the pioneering authors of Modernism and literary Impressionism.

We will begin with a brief overview of the author's life and milieu in order to gain some perspective on the biographical elements that undoubtedly played a role in the emergence of Ford's writerly style. We will then move on to an analysis of the sprawling text of The Good Soldier, which is characterized by its inventive use of the flashback device. Structurally, the work makes use of a non-chronological order of events relayed by an unreliable narrator. We will investigate these formal devices, showing how the structure of the novel is meant to mirror the chaotic events depicted throughout the course of the book.

We will then turn our attention to what is arguably Ford's finest achievement, the tetralogy Parade's End. We will explore the ways in which the main character of this work is linked with the unreliable narrator of The Good Soldier, and examine the ways in which the character's psychological development influences the texture of the work. We will conclude by showing how Ford's unique literary Impressionism has left a distinctive mark — not only on Modernism, but also on the evolution of literature in general.

Throughout our analysis, we will make use of the authoritative Bodley Head edition of Ford Madox Ford's works, as well as an array of standard and recent scholarship on these two novels.

The Author and His Milieu

Throughout the course of his prolific career, Ford Madox Ford wore many hats. Not only was he a distinguished novelist, he was also renowned as the editor of two of the literary magazines that would come to define English-language Modernism: The English Review and The Transatlantic Review. Ford was also a distinguished critic who helped launch the careers of some of the most important names in early twentieth-century letters. Over the course of his lifetime, Ford published more than eighty volumes. His main theme was the conflict between the evolution of modern industrial society and the traditional values of the British. In his personal life, Ford was known for being something of a ladies' man. He was involved with several women, including the novelist Jean Rhys, who wrote about their affair in the novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.

Ford was born into the bohemian surroundings of Merton, Surrey, where his father was a writer and music editor of The Times and his grandfather was the esteemed painter Ford Madox Brown. His father, whose full name was Franz Carl Christoph Johannes Hueffer, belonged to an illustrious German family that owned a printing house and a newspaper in their native Münster. While the Hueffers had traditionally been a Catholic family, Hueffer himself was rather unconventional — he was an atheist and a disciple of Schopenhauer, factors that may have led him to emigrate to England in 1869, where his son Ford was born four years later. Hueffer has been described as

"a rather bulky but not a tall man, of very Teutonic physiognomy: brilliant, ruddy complexion, brilliant yellow hair, blue eyes radiant with quickness and penetration… though not a melancholy person in his ordinary demeanour, [he] had a certain tinge of hypochondria in his outlook on life" (William Michael Rossetti, quoted in Mizener 1985, p. 3).

Hueffer undoubtedly had a major influence on his son's development. He was an intellectual of numerous accomplishments and, like his brothers — one of whom was a professor of history, the other two of whom became quite wealthy in business — was highly ambitious. In addition to his philosophical pursuits, Hueffer was an accomplished musicologist. He penned a number of librettos for operas by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, including The Troubadour and Colomba, as well as a study of Wagner and a book titled The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages, published in 1878. As his son would later do, he started two intellectually ambitious magazines, both of which were financial failures. One, The New Quarterly, was meant to serve as a vehicle for the promotion of Schopenhauer's ideas, while the second, The Musical World, was rooted in the ideas and music of Wagner.

Ford grew up in an environment where such literary and artistic figures as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones were regular visitors. From a young age, Ford traveled widely throughout continental Europe. He studied in Folkestone at the Praetorius School, and upon the death of his father, moved with his family to London, where he continued his education at University College School. Despite the fact that Ford never attended university, he was fluent in several languages, including French, German, Italian, and Flemish, and was also proficient in classical languages such as Greek and Latin. While still a teenager, Ford converted to Catholicism.

At the age of eighteen, Ford published his first book, The Brown Owl, a fairy tale featuring illustrations by his grandfather. Three years later, Ford married Elsie Martindale. In 1908 the marriage broke up, although Ford never officially divorced her. Throughout his life, it is estimated that Ford had over twenty romantic relationships with women. This is hard to imagine from a contemporary standpoint, as Ford was not conventionally good-looking. Despite his overweight frame and poor teeth, however, Ford possessed many other charms relating to his exceptional memory and intellect. He was able to woo admirers by quoting long passages from the classics from memory. On one occasion, he began working on a French translation of one of his own works without even having the original in front of him, so strongly was it fixed in his memory. Eventually, the many scandals Ford provoked — including an affair with his wife's sister — combined with his poor health and financial troubles, led to a nervous breakdown in 1904.

Much of Ford's earlier output consisted of collaborations with Joseph Conrad. The pair first became acquainted in the late 1890s and together collaborated on two novels, The Inheritors and Romance. Ford was deeply inspired in his own work by Conrad's utilization of mediating narrators, a technique that would come to the forefront in The Good Soldier. Ford's most impressionistic text from this era was The Soul of London, through which he tried to capture the spirit of the city through a series of impressionistic jottings. Critics such as Saunders (2005) have situated The Soul of London as a pivotal representation of Impressionism in Ford's oeuvre, linking the author's Impressionist tendencies with an urbanism frequently associated with both the Transparent and Mediated forms of painterly Impressionism (Brettell 1999, p. 18). The book marks a pivotal starting point in most discussions of Ford's affiliation with Impressionist tendencies in literary discourse and represents a vital transition not only in Ford's own oeuvre but in the history of Western literature:

"The Soul of London is a transitional book. It is both original and 'Fordian' while yet belonging to a slew of works in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that engaged with the spirit of London in sundry quasi-essentialist ways. It was, on paper at least, traditional enough in its concerns to be commercially successful. However, its impressionistic perceptions of the metropolis were more in line with the radicalism of writers such as Arthur Symons than the stolid certainties of London's contemporary historians W. J. Loftie and Walter Besant" (Freeman 2005, p. 28).

Between 1906 and 1908, Ford published his first great work, The Fifth Queen, a trilogy based on Catherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife. The English Review was launched to much fanfare in 1908, bringing to the general public the writings of such figures as Henry James, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. During a particularly tumultuous period in Ford's life, which involved his stormy relationship with writer Violet Hunt, Ford lost possession of the Review in 1910. It was also during this period that Ford was ordered to pay child support for his two daughters; when he refused to do so, he was sent to prison for over a week.

Ford's most accomplished novel, The Good Soldier, was published when he was forty-two. This celebrated work features a first-person narrative and tells the story of two couples, the English Ashburnhams and the American Dowells. John Dowell is the narrator, through whom we learn of Florence and Edward Ashburnham's affair, which culminates in the suicide of Florence — John's wife. Edward is the "good soldier" of the title. It is through the rambling, textured narration of John that the author attempts to forge a literary corollary to actual thought — quite similar, in fact, to the Impressionist painters' experiments with capturing nature on their canvases:

"You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads" (Ford 1962).

Samuel Beckett would later deploy this literary technique in such works as Molloy, as would J. M. Coetzee in In the Heart of the Country. Ford regarded The Good Soldier as the best of his early novels — a position to which most critics tend to concede.

During the First World War, Ford enlisted as a lieutenant in the Welch Regiment. It was during his time in the service that he composed "Antwerp," a poem that T. S. Eliot later commended as the only good war poem he had ever read. Ford was shell-shocked in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme; the following year he was sent home as an invalid. Many of Ford's poems were directly inspired by his experiences of the war.

Ford spent the years following the war recovering in the country. He soon grew bored with the slow pace of rural life, however, and moved to Paris with the painter Stella Bowen. He then launched The Transatlantic Review, a magazine that featured the writing of such leading literary personalities as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, e. e. cummings, and Jean Rhys. It was in 1919 that Ford changed his name from Ford Madox Hueffer to Ford Madox Ford. Six years later, he took legal measures to restrain Violet Hunt from describing herself as his wife.

"No more hope, no more glory, not for the nation, not for the world I dare say, no more parades," Ford famously wrote in his 1925 novel No More Parades, part of the tetralogy Parade's End. The four volumes of this work appeared between 1924 and 1928. It was undoubtedly Ford's most ambitious work to date — if not the most ambitious of his entire career. The work was lauded by such luminaries as W. H. Auden, among others. The main character is Christopher Tietjens, and Ford employs his impressionistic technique to masterful effect in his depiction of Tietjens' struggle to survive in a harsh, cruel world. Tietjens becomes the victim of numerous cruelties — his wife is unfaithful, his friends betray him, and everything he values is threatened at various points throughout the four novels. In the final two books, A Man Could Stand Up and Last Post, Tietjens succeeds in freeing himself from the ethical values of old English life and attempts to make peace with the new world that surrounds him.

In addition to being one of the pivotal authors of Modernism and literary Impressionism, Ford was also associated with the Imagist movement. He appeared in the Imagist anthology published in 1930, and his ideas on Impressionism in literature were to have a strong influence on the work of Ezra Pound, a key figure in the Imagist circle.

Ford spent the last few years of his life in the United States and the south of France, much of that time with a young American artist, Janice Biala. In 1937–1938 he accepted a post as visiting lecturer in literature at a university, where he began working on his last great work, The March of Literature, which appeared in 1939, the year of his death. Intended for the general reader, it explored the works of ancient Egypt and China and continued up to the modern era.

Ford had long been known for his sharp, unconventional views of literature. As he stated early on in his monograph on Joseph Conrad: "Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst." The March of Literature contained a series of at times startling conclusions; he describes Defoe as "an utterly humdrum writer," observes that Dostoevsky "has the aspect of greatness of an enormously enlarged but misty statue of Sophocles," and suggests that the pleasure of reading Joyce consists "entirely from his skill in juggling words as a juggler." Ford had very little patience for literary critics, which is perhaps why he intended this book for the general reader; in his words:

"But for the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one's personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time."

The first half of The March of Literature was composed in Michigan in the summer of 1937 while Ford was staying with his friends Caroline and Allen Tate. He continued work on the book in Paris, returning to Michigan the following spring to finish it. Ford passed away on the 26th of June 1939 in Deauville, France.

Ford is typically remembered today as a great editor who discovered many of the leading names of literary Modernism, while only a small audience recognizes that his finest achievements lie in his novels. Ford was perhaps cognizant of his posthumous destiny near the end of his life, when he assessed his career as follows:

"I have written at least fifty-two books, of which a couple might stand; I have dug, hoed, pruned, and sometimes even harvested twenty-six kitchen gardens that I can remember… and thirteen times I have travelled the round that goes from London to New York, New Orleans, the Azores, Gibraltar, Marseilles, Paris, London… If I had not so constantly travelled, I should have reaped better harvests and written more and better books; if I weren't, when travelling, constantly impeded by the desire to settle down somewhere and start something growing and write something, I should have travelled more happily and farther" (Mizener xiv–xv).

Most biographers and critics agree that Ford was a deeply divided individual and that this division had an effect on his work. While he was known for being a strongly opinionated critic, as well as a vain writer who wanted above all to be admired, he was not the greatest writer of his generation — though he is certainly one of the most accomplished. Mizener has attributed the rift that exists in Ford's work to this inner division:

"Most of Ford's astonishing quantity of work was produced by the writer of talent in him, the skillful craftsman with his irrepressible delight in his métier. But somewhere inside him, apparently beyond the control of his conscious will, there was another self in Ford, what he called in his novels 'the under self.' This under self is the source of his best work. Its voice can be heard from time to time in his early books, but it is clearest in The Good Soldier and Parade's End. It fades out in his later work, for much as he longed to be a part of the new literary world that he, as an Edwardian rebel, had helped to make possible, his under self remained an old Bolshevik… These late novels are skillful exercises in the special form Ford had gradually developed over the great years of his career, but they have no significant subject. Only the final poems, the expression of his feelings for Janice Biala, speak with the voice of his under self" (Mizener 1985, pp. xxii–xxiii; Ford 1994, p. 640).

In what follows, we hope to show the ways in which this "under self" comes to the forefront of Ford's unique literary style in his best novels. It is to two of these works, The Good Soldier and the Parade's End series, that we now turn.

The Good Soldier, widely considered to be Ford's masterpiece, is a stylistically unprecedented work of literature. Ford himself, never shy of self-congratulation, readily admitted as much; he would later write of "taking down one of [his] ten-year-old books [and exclaiming] 'Great Heavens, did I write as well as that then?' … And I will permit myself to say that I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references" (quoted in Smiley 2006). While The Good Soldier was not the last of Ford's great accomplishments, it is certainly one of his most coherent on both a structural and textural level.

The plot of The Good Soldier is deceptively simple. It tells the story of two couples — one English, one American — who meet at a spa in Germany. Edward, the English husband, suffers from a heart condition, as does Florence, the American wife. The two couples quickly form a friendship that endures for several years. Eventually, however, it is revealed that during this time Florence and Edward have been carrying on an affair. Leonora, the English wife, knows about the affair throughout, but the narrator of the novel — John Dowell, the American husband — does not find out until much later. It is only upon the deaths of both adulterers that more about their affair is revealed, placing John in the unwitting position of a sort of detective. Although he would have preferred not to know about his wife's infidelity with his dear friend, the facts come to him continuously throughout the novel, which is structured as a series of seemingly endless digressions — effectively mirroring the way in which memory works. As Dowell tells us near the beginning of the novel:

The Good Soldier

"Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't know. You, the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well, she was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles and over seas and over the salons of modistes and over the plages of the Riviera — like a gay tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years" (Ford 1962, p. 24).

Like Florence, the prose of Ford's narrator seems to dance throughout the novel — much as colors seem to dance across a canvas by Monet. Now that Florence is gone permanently from his life, it becomes Dowell's task to preserve her memory and make her immortal through his narrative, just as in life it was his job to keep her alive. It is through this artful, impressionistic structuring of events — and its deliberate disregard of chronology — that the novel builds its suspense and drama, keeping generations of readers engaged from beginning to end. Every utterance made by the narrator or other characters, no matter how insignificant it may seem at first, later acquires significance as the plot unravels.

Owing to the highly textured narrative, it is worth examining John Dowell in fuller detail, as he is the medium through which the narrative is generated. As narrators go, Dowell is remarkably naïve. He comes from a well-to-do Philadelphia family and apparently has very few ambitions in life other than to be married to Florence — this, despite the fact that she comes across as an incredibly demanding spouse who is resistant to physical intimacy with her husband. Emotionally, Florence is distant and unwilling to share her deepest feelings with Dowell, yet he loves her in spite of all her apparent flaws. Owing to her supposed heart condition, Florence claims she is unable to engage in sexual activity with her husband, effectively turning him into a kind of servant forced to cater to her every need — while she simultaneously carries on at least two love affairs.

One of the idiosyncratic elements of Dowell's narration is that his voice sounds far from American; in fact, the book is narrated in a definitively early twentieth-century British idiom. Smiley (2006) has argued that this suits the theme of The Good Soldier quite well, however, since the book's ultimate subject is not America at the turn of the century but England. Dowell, as an expatriate, quickly comes to favor the upper-class Edwardian lifestyle of the English in the early twentieth century. At the same time, he is conflicted about its high standards and attention to detail — he finds very rare roast beef nauseating, brandy disagreeable, and is repelled by cold baths. What is most repellent to Dowell about Edwardian values, it is eventually revealed, is that social decorum seems to serve as a means of preventing people from truly knowing one another — hence all the secrets that the close friends of the central narrative are able to keep, secrets that Leonora is openly aware of but that remain a mystery to the uninitiated American. In the words of Mizener:

"There was certainly, in the Edwardian world Ford was contemplating, some radical discontinuity between what Dowell calls the 'natural inclinations' of people's unconscious selves and the trained habits of their conscious selves that made them 'good people' and that made their society 'the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame.' Perhaps there always has been such a discontinuity; perhaps there always will be. Perhaps the more beautifully ordered and successfully disciplined the 'parade' of civilization becomes, the more destructive of men's natural inclinations it also becomes" (Mizener 1985, pp. 276–277).

This struggle between the Edwardian virtues of old and the Modernism of the new world would later come to the forefront in Ford's Parade's End tetralogy.

If Dowell has any virtues that shine through the course of the narrative, they are his earnestness and his disarming quality. Unlike the notoriously egotistical author behind the work, Dowell continuously expresses his self-doubts and shortcomings. He is never self-serving throughout his narrative; in general, he is overly generous to those who perhaps do not always deserve it. In such a rambling narrative, it is not possible to be "reliable" in reporting facts; Dowell's very unreliability — as both a person and a narrator — contributes much to the rich texture of The Good Soldier. Furthermore, his portraits of Edward, Florence, Leonora, and other characters provide an apt literary equivalent to painterly Impressionism in their personal, if scattered, style of rendering.

Rather than allowing his emotions regarding his wife's untimely demise to overwhelm the narrative, Dowell portrays Leonora and Edward as endowed with respectability, character, and grace. The few flaws attributed to Edward appear to relate to his limited intelligence and education — he is otherwise portrayed as a generous individual. As a respected magistrate and landlord in England, he is endowed with a high degree of morality; he is responsible and upright. At the same time, perhaps owing to this lack of depth, Edward is portrayed as sentimental — a major flaw, in that he is often perceived by others as weak or frail in character. This also makes him, like Dowell, a weaker figure in comparison to his wife, who — like Florence — is strong and determined.

Leonora is often portrayed as "cold" by Dowell. We learn, for instance, that Leonora and Edward have not spoken in private for over a dozen years, despite their show of warmth and affection in public. While it would have been easy to reduce Edward and Leonora to caricatures — indeed, their "types" are rife in English literature — Ford addresses their inner lives seriously, treating their inherent emptiness as symptomatic of the turmoil of the transitional era during which the story takes place. The lack of intimacy in both their lives has been aptly characterized by Smiley as follows:

"It is clear as the novel proceeds that not only do Edward and Leonora have no idea what intimacy is, they also have no way of finding out: for one thing, they don't read novels, and for another, Leonora consults priests and nuns for marital advice, and what they have to offer are third-hand clichés such as 'men are like that.' Edward consults no one, and there seems to be no structure in his life that would permit such consultation… Thus, when Edward begins to feel out of sympathy with Leonora some three or four years into their marriage, he is ripe for exploitation, and he ends up making a costly liaison and losing about 40 percent of the principal value of his estate. Over the next ten years Leonora takes over management of the estate and brings it back to its original value, but the balance of their relationship is fatally undermined by her control and his untrustworthiness."

What Leonora and Edward's marriage has in common with that of Florence and John is that both marriages feature emasculated men. It is implied, via John's narration, that both men have been complicit in their own emasculation. While Dowell's emasculation remains something of a mystery throughout The Good Soldier, Edward seems to have participated in his own by receiving no education in life other than following protocol — hence, he becomes the "good soldier" of the title. While Edward's emasculation can be attributed to a lack of intelligence, John's submission to his wife's ill treatment can only be attributed to a general lethargy, symbolized by his admission that he has no real interest in steering his life in any particular direction.

Because he seems aware of having been emasculated, John has grown to accept his status in the relationship. Edward, on the other hand, is never able to fully accept his position — probably, it is implied, because he is unable to fully understand why things are as they are. He thus resorts to a series of affairs of which his wife is openly aware. Leonora seems to believe that once they are in a more financially stable position, he will regain his interest in her.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the plot is the fact that John remains devoted to his wife throughout — while simultaneously portraying her as a rather shallow, vile creature. Despite her strong intellect, she clearly wants to be catered to. Her sole desire is to be the center of attention, and she will do whatever is necessary to attain it. Morally, she is a rather abject figure, and yet John loves her and refuses to criticize her — despite the fact that, through his narration, he reveals how she is hardly a likeable human being. While she may conceal her intentions behind an intellectual demeanor, Florence is little more than a crude social climber at heart.

It quickly becomes apparent that, beyond the veneer of friendship, Leonora does not actually like Florence. This is revealed early in the novel through a disagreement over religion. When Florence crudely insults the Catholic faith to which Leonora belongs, Leonora takes John aside. John attempts to defend his wife, but Leonora will have none of it:

"'It's hardly as much as that. I mean, that I must claim the liberty of a free American citizen to think what I please about your co-religionists. And I suppose that Florence must have liberty to think what she pleases and to say what politeness allows her to say.' 'She had better,' Leonora answered, 'not say one single word against my people or my faith.' It struck me at the time, that there was an unusual, an almost threatening, hardness in her voice. It was almost as if she were trying to convey to Florence, through me, that she would seriously harm my wife if Florence went to something that was an extreme" (Ford 1962, pp. 67–68).

It is through Edward's liaison with Florence that Leonora eventually loses all respect for her husband. Leonora is described by Dowell thus:

"Leonora, as I have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say she acted perfectly normally in the perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But, if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora" (Ford 1962).

Dowell thus upholds Leonora's femininity as "normal," in that she is all too willing to submit to her traditional role in the dominant Edwardian establishment — something repugnant to his unconventional wife, Florence. Unlike Florence, Leonora has no need for greater power or influence over her husband's life or anyone else's. She seeks only to keep up appearances and maintain proper social decorum, no matter what may be happening behind the scenes. She is perfectly content to play the role that society has allotted to her: she desires children and a place within the establishment — the former of which she and her husband are unable to achieve, a fact that brings them both great unhappiness.

What lends the narrative an additional layer of texture is Ford's reliance on paradox throughout. Despite his devotion to his wife, Dowell occasionally questions why he stayed with her throughout their marriage, lapsing out of denial to momentarily acknowledge the lovelessness of their relationship:

"For peace I never had with Florence, and I hardly believe that I cared for her in the way of love after a year or two of it. She became for me a rare and fragile object, something burdensome, but very frail. Why it was as if I had been given a thin-shelled pullet's egg to carry on my palm from Equatorial Africa to Hoboken. Yes, she became for me, as it were, the subject of a bet — the trophy of an athlete's achievement, a parsley crown that is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness, and of his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value as a wife, I think she had none at all for me. I fancy I was not even proud of the way she dressed" (Ford 1962, pp. 86–97).

Through his portrayal of Leonora and Florence, it quickly becomes apparent that Dowell views women as both powerful creatures and entirely inhuman in their behavior. He sees in both women — especially his wife — a desire and capacity for change that frightens him, as women serve as the very fabric upon which society is built. While Leonora initially upholds herself in a "normal" fashion early in the novel, as catastrophe looms her pristine façade begins to crack and fade, leading to the catastrophic conclusion of events. She essentially becomes mad, and Dowell affiliates her madness with an innate evil or "wickedness." He is once again unable to fully reconcile not only the change in his personal life, but also the passing of an entire way of life — Edwardian England — which has become a relic of the past. This is symbolized by the dissolution of the female characters in the novel, both of whom ultimately transgress their allotted social roles through their actions.

While John's portrayal of Edward is largely sympathetic, there are occasional strange outbursts, such as when, summarizing Edward's military career, he suddenly states, "It would have done him a great deal of good to get killed." Yet once we reach the end of the novel and can see how profoundly tragic Edward's demise is, this outburst begins to make more sense. As a "good soldier," it would indeed have been far better for Edward to have met a heroic end rather than the pathetic legacy he leaves behind. Thus, the title is loaded with irony, the sharpness of which contributes much to the richness of the narrative's psychological discourse.

We have in The Good Soldier a novel whose stylistic richness is rooted in its complex set of references and cross-references, enabling both complementary and contradictory meanings to emerge in nearly every sentence and giving the reader an endless web of meanings to interpret. In the course of the novel, Ford very carefully constructs a complex plot that intertwines its characters' psychological states with events, chance, and muddled intentions. What emerges is a very complex picture of modern life.

It should be noted that Ford originally wanted to call his book The Saddest Story. But the book was not published until shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, at which point the publisher decided that the reading public probably did not want another "sad story." The final title, The Good Soldier, adds a layer of intrigue the original title would have lacked. What is more, in its subtlety, the title gives us a glimpse into the social dimension that Ford's main characters inhabit. It is not only stupidity that Edward and the other characters face; it is mostly a moral issue that each in turn must combat in order to win or lose the battle of life as it is depicted in the novel. As Smiley (2006) has written of The Good Soldier:

"[The characters] are representatives of a system that fails them and fails in their failure. It is the subtler side of Dickens's Circumlocution Office, of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. In Dickens's and Thackeray's day, the landed gentry could still be attacked. By Ford's time, all the social and cultural arrangements of feudal Europe were imploding in the First World War. Ford was astute enough to depict both the inevitability of the implosion and its sadness — the world of Jane Austen a hundred years on, depopulated, lonely and dark."

A further level of intrigue is added once one becomes cognizant of the fact that Dowell is apparently unaware of the larger significance of the events he is narrating (Cousineau 2004, p. 86). Even in his portrayal of his dear friend Edward, whom he clearly pities, he is ultimately unable to decide whether Edward is a true hero or an utter, contemptible failure. What makes Dowell so human is his inability to draw a conclusion to the textured mass of thoughts that comprise the narrative, of which this strand is perhaps emblematic:

"I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness" (Ford 1962, p. 14).

It is ultimately up to the reader, then, to decide the level of irony that goes into the title The Good Soldier.

Conclusion

In reading two of Ford Madox Ford's greatest literary creations, we come to find that, in addition to being a gifted storyteller, Ford was also a crafty practitioner of the art of writing. His finely textured writings give rise to one of the finest examples of Impressionism that we have in literature.