Andrew's Wiki
Good Soldier

“World on the brink of destruction, nostalgia for what’s been lost by the war”

Folks

• John Dowell, our weak narrator, an expat, deracine Quaker American from Philly who is merely a nursemaid to a beautiful girl, now trying to understand the underlying web of deception that he had been oblivious to during his entire marriage. As he narrates the story, he realizes more and more of the story but has problems of memory and of characterization, having trouble understanding the passions and motivations of others. He ends up by identifying with his main character, Edward, pretending to be what he’s not. Misguided, gullible, completely devoid of passion, he merely drifts along from one vague, short-term desire to another. Serviceable but not really good at anything, he tries to heroicize everyone around him, but shows glimmers of despair, finally ending up making Edward a hero and a victim. He incompletely conquers the old habits of narration and traditional values. Creepily, he wants to be Edward by the end.

• Florence Dowell, his deceitful wife, a flirt, always dancing and bright, another American (Connecticut: from New England “purity” loving folk), full of encyclopedic knowledge of everything and yet nothing important, nursing a fake heart problem to mask her other—and real—heart problem: her penchant for unwise affairs. She wants to be Leonora, a real county woman in the land of her ancestors, but when she sees that this will fail, and that her husband is about to be undeceived, she commits suicide. Dowell is unfair to her, but you’ve got to sympathize with him anyway.

• Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier, superficially a good man of the realm (the important county landowner, good to tenants, good on a horse, devoted to his troops, always neat and clean, having the best of clothing and accoutrements and sport), but he’s either (as John thinks) a sentimentalist who keeps falling in love one after another (and victimized by Nancy and Leonora) or a despicable womanizer who’s vain and cruel, trying to conquer one unknown woman-land after another. After he loses money from gambling and affairs, Leonora strips him of his ability to manage his own money, humiliating him but making him grateful to her: his primary emotion towards her. His last affair, with Nancy, breaks him because of the awful fights with Leonora, because he knows he has nothing to look forward to but repetition of the horror.

• Leonora Ashburnham, the Catholic daughter of a poverty-stricken Irish landowner, supposedly “normal” (says John) but showing great powers of organization, self-control, will power, and loyalty in spite of problems. She loves and hates Edward, and she’s the rival of Nancy and Florence. Her strict, almost overbearing control over Edward is “all wrong for the case,” says John, and her Catholic morals make her want to keep him no matter what. And yet she compromises all over the place to keep him happy, even “procuring” for him. Her increasing obsession is solved when Edward commits suicide, and she marries a normal local man and will have a normal family.

Themes

• Passing feudalism
• Nostalgia versus suspicion: both
• Deceptive appearances
  • The “goodly apple” they possessed was rotten all along
    • People were just acting
  • The perfect marriage was horrifying
    • Edward and Leonora were not well matched in any sense of the word
    • Even at the last terrible stage, Edward, Leonora, and Nancy act like nothing’s going on in particular
• Opacity of Folks
  • You can’t ever really know anyone, even with nine years’ acquaintance
  • “Who in this world knows anything of any other heart – or of his own?” (144)
  • Misleading importance of “character”
    • The maid who steals Flo’s diamond ring: it’s totally out of character, yet she does it
    • People are unpredictable
  • Otherness of people
    • Dowell can’t imagine the Catholic mind, being a Protestant
    • Nationality, gender, and religion are seen as barriers to knowing people
• English manhood
  • It no longer makes good: it has crumbled and now hides calumny
• The Bad Heart
  • Fake physical illness
    • Both Ed and Flo are faking their heart troubles
  • Real psychological illness
    • They do have problems with love and sex
• Unrootedness
  • These Americans don’t have the roots of Branshaw Teleragh, like Edward
  • Deracine wandering about Europe
• Metaphor: Europe breaking up
  • The breakup of their foursome he feels represents some larger looming problem
  • ie, publishing date and WWI (And the August 4 coincidence: Aug 4, 1914 when war beings – and that’s Florence’s superstitious date)
• No moral guidance left in the world
  • Religion doesn’t seem to help them anymore, not even Leonora
  • Can’t judge good/evil, justice/injustice anymore
• Life is merely drifting from one desire to the next
  • Recathecting
• Discovery of unconscious feelings and motivations
  • This book as a case study because it is a demonstration of the talking cure
• Nothingness
  • He doesn’t have anything to show for his life, not even some silly souvenir
• Collective (Ed) versus Individual (Leon)
• Speech
  • Speech can almost create: “as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing that he spoke then, created the passion as they went along. Before he spoke, there was nothing.” (110)
  • Speech makes unconscious desires conscious
  • Speech makes you realize what you’re going to do
  • Too much communication is hellish
    • If you can’t control talk, you’re all undone
    • Sometimes you should keep your mouth shut!
  • Narration: speech makes you figure things out, sort through things, and therefore rewrites history
    • Cf Tradition and the Individual Talent: present rewriting past
• Memory
  • Unreliable
• Sacrifice of abnormal so the normal can live on
  • Nancy crazy, Edward dies so Leonora can be okay
• Tragedy or lack thereof
  • 151: Why call it Saddest Story? “because tehre was no current to draw things along to a swit and inevitable end. There is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is no nemesis, no destiny…. There is not even any villain.”
    • He’s says there’s no purpose, no lesson to be learned: “It is all a darkness.”
    • And the book increasingly ends with him repeating I Don’t Know.
  • 225: It’s the happy ending (villains punished, good rewarded), but it turns out the happy ending is ghastly
• Different types of alienation
• Conflict between modern alienating society and inherited values
• Relationship between past and present

Style/Modernism

• Narrator not main character: a new technique
• Unreliable, self-conscious narrator
• Intricate cross-references
• Ford says it’s French
• Unpolished
• Maze
• Digressions: he makes them, apologizes, but it asks the question, “What is really important?” The digressions are just as important.
  • Re-evaluation of content
• 42: Uninteresting details matter to a story very much
• Information comes by association, not logical connection or chronology
• He says he writes in a frivolous way to avoid crying
• Love as seeing through another’s eyes: isn’t that writing?
• Chronology completely destroyed
• Impressionism
  • Rather than transcendence
  • A dominant and self-conscious theme in the book, at least perceptually
  • For all Ford’s love of impressionism, he still keeps the negative connotation: ie, an impression is something that’s not true
    • “Well, those are my impressions,” he says dismissively, or like an excuse for them, feeling ashamed.
    • Had an “impression” he was gone from States for 30 years: actually, 12
    • Constantly worries about having given “false impression”
    • “I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.” (167)
      • Problems, digressions, false impressions are REAL.
  • “the whole world for me is like spots of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren’t so I should have something to catch hold of now.” (20)
    • Why? Because he never really has a home, wants to return to places he hasn’t visited again
    • Impressionism thus is product of rootlessness too
  • Descriptive scenes that are impressionistic
    • The field and cows
      • “Though of course the country isn’t really green.” (44)
• Self-conscious narrator
  • Worries about misleading the reader
  • Tells motive for writing: to forget what you’ve seen, yet to put it all down for history to remember
  • Digression: is it?
  • Fireside chat stuff
  • “I’m not really interested in these facts but they have a bearing on my story.” (45)
  • “You have the facts for the trouble of finding them.” (167)
  • His reflections keep interrupting the story, and he admits it.
  • So hard to keep everyone up to date!
  • 220: “I can’t make out which one of them was right.” “I don’t know.” “I know nothing.”
• Shift from objective to subjective, perceived to perceiver, content less important
• Highlights alternative modes of knowing

Images

• 12: John’s title deeds as the only thing rooting him to a geographical locale
• 13: minuet, as the metaphor for their choreographed lives: it’s either beautiful or a prison
• 19: fireside conversation as narrative philosophy (the reader is listening)
• 24: Uncle John’s oranges and folding chairs as “tips” on cruise
• 44-5: Cow tipping over into a creek (he’s enjoying himself and feels safe right at the moment things are falling apart)
• 56: the tiara that bankrupts Ashburnhams
• 73: Maisie’s death: suitcase as alligator, shoes sticking out
• 196-8: the Brand divorce case that destroys Nancy’s innocence
• Shuttlecocks: What Nancy blurts out: everyone feels like they’re batted back and forth between people

Bad Nauheim

• Leisure can create bad health (ie, gout, dyspepsia), or does bad health lead to leisure (like Ed and Flo want it to)?
  • Edward’s problems lead Leonora’s spiritual advisors to take him to Monte Carlo for some fun: it will “save” marriage, apparently
• They use bad health as an excuse to pursue affairs (Edward with Maisie; Florence with Jimmy)
• The routine of the spa allows the dalliance to go on
  • Florence is always out of his sight, but yet he thinks she isn’t
  • Always away in baths or with doctors or exercising or manicures or…
• The structured environment helps them keep up the “minuet”
• Patients “get a home feeling,” so it makes artificial roots – but everyone else feels stripped
• Sober atmosphere: Bad Nauheim is one that pretends to be all about health but really about pleasure
• They actually prescribe trips, the trips which make for drama
• Travel and Leisure: you are run by inviolable, easy-to-see habits (the long list of things they do punctually, eating and drinking, etc)
  • Leisure is kind of structured
• Hotels: Means that you don’t really have domestic space, private: it’s only all public space
  • Cf Florence seeing Leonora smacking Maisie b/c the hall is public
• It pretends to fix, but there, it all falls apart.

Quotes

• 6: Preface which says that Good Soldier wasn’t meant to be as avant-garde as Lewis, Pound, Eliot, but just meant as something quainter (but then war intervenes)
• 7: “something of a race that will have no successors:” this book is his “auk’s egg,” the last effort (tho’ it wasn’t technically)
• 11: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
• 13: “the breaking up of our little four-square coterie was just another unthinkable event,” like sack of Rome
• 104: “like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.”
  • He wants himself to be a novelist…he wants to see clearly
• 105: “It is melodrama; but I can’t help it.”
• 114: “Florence was a personality of paper – that she represented a real human being…only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold.”
• 200: “It is so difficult to keep all these people going…. I wish I could put it down in diary form.”
• 213: “Not one of us has got what he really wanted.”
• 223: “I think that it would have been better in the eyes of God if they had all attempted to gouge out each other’s eyes with carving knives. But they were ‘good people.’”
  228: About the beauty of Nancy with blankness of madness inside: “it is a picture without a meaning.”