The Good Soldier: The Tale as John Dowell Tells It
A detailed look at The Good Soldier’s famously unreliable and manipulative narrator.
WHEN JOHN DOWELL narrated the initial sentence of The Good Soldier1, he invited only sympathetic readers. The famous opening line2 focuses on him and the emotion of sadness. He’s asking you, the reader, to lead with an open heart and think about his situation and his friends from his perspective—and only his perspective. Think of yourself, he says, as silently listening to him tell the tale in a cottage3.
The setting of a cottage with a silent listener is imagined in the early pages, but by the novel’s end Dowell makes it clear that the setting is reality. This is one of his4 storytelling techniques5: share a tale, leave out key details, flash back to it in later chapters, add the details, and cast doubt. The brilliance of this technique is that the narration feels like it’s happening in real-time. Dowell is relying on his memories and his so-called diaries, which recount his coterie’s stories with his select perspective.
For example, Dowell openly says that he won’t share Leonora’s story, who is Edward Ashburnham’s wife, because it seems exaggerated for his novel, ensuring that we don’t receive her thoughts unless he approves:
Leonora has told me, but I daresay she exaggerated and the figure seems so preposterous that I will not put it down …
Dowell is alarmingly aware that the story is only his perspective. He points out that no one will understand the story any more than what he shares. Isn’t it unjust to smear someone’s name without allowing them to share their side?
But the inconvenient—well, hang it all, I will say it—the damnable nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted, you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued.
Even when Dowell is speaking positively about his friends, he is unable to do so neutrally without tainting their character with his perspective. He will have the reader’s head nodding in understanding and then add a word or two at the end of the sentence that stops them. Consider the word “public” in the following:
Well, Edward Ashburnham was worth having. Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was-the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character?
The obvious question: What is Edward like in private?
Throughout the novel, Dowell deliberately sows doubt in the reader’s mind and sometimes returns later to clean it up or pile on more incriminating information. He uses techniques like the previously mentioned, double quotes around ordinary words6, real-time revisions7, and inconsistent spelling of other words.
The word “shuttlecocks” is used to symbolize the novel’s characters flinging back and forth like a birdie between badminton rackets. The word is also spelled “shuttle-cocks” by Dowell, which doesn’t change its meaning but is a granular example of Dowell’s (and Ford’s) inconsistency and unreliability.
The symbolism and unreliability continue with Dowell’s general forgetfulness about his friends and lovers, yet he has precise knowledge of historical figures and places that speak to his friends’ personalities. Here are notable ones:
Nauheim, Germany: The location of many tales in the story and a place where sufferers of the heart were cured. Dowell’s wife, Florence (and her Uncle John), allegedly suffered from a heart condition. Dowell later retracted the statement.
Catholicism and Anglicanism: The characters attempt to use their religions as guides to resolving immoral situations that they created.
Pierre Vidal: A troubadour who wrote poetry about love triangles. Dowell compares Florence to Vidal.
Ludwig the Courageous: Unclear which Ludwig it may have been. Dowell says he’s not a “historian” but claims Ludwig was known for wanting multiple wives simultaneously or, in Dowell’s words, “something like that.” He says this when remembering that Florence was once giving Edward a history lesson.
Aesculapius: Mythological god of medicine. Dowell says the medicine to a good relationship is doing things you dislike or don’t want.
Mrs Markham: Author of history textbooks for children. Notably, the textbooks omit ruins and all bad things.
Dowell’s use of symbolism not only reflect on his friends but himself. He is also searching for an upper hand on them by building them up and tearing them down, an escape route from his marriage, a contrived affair with another character, and more. Dowell is the part of the larger story that we will never hear, and that’s what makes him the finest unreliable narrator in literature.
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The Good Soldier is a story about two married couples who were friends for nine years and frequently vacationed together in Nauheim, Germany. John Dowell, the story’s narrator, attempts to unravel the love affairs and lives of him and his friends.
“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
“I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener … “
Ford Madox Ford, the novel’s author, was a narcissist, a storyteller, a messy lover, a self-diagnosed sufferer of the heart that he tried to cure in Germany, a man obsessed with gentlemanliness, and a propagandist who controlled the public’s perception. Sound familiar?
“One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression.”
’The given proposition was, that we were all "good people."’
“For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting-or, no, not acting-sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth?” Were they acting or not acting?
I just started rereading this novel. Seen through the lens of this post Dowell's immediate comparison of the breakup of his "four-square coterie" to the sack of Rome is a bit grandiose.