Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of modernism. The opening line "This is the saddest story I ever heard" is very apt. From that line onwards, there is really very little to feel good about in this story. While I hate to ever give plot away in any of my posts, there may be possible spoilers here--I will try not to give too much away (better to save any details for discussion).
The "good soldier" is Edward Ashburnam. By all appearances he leads a distinguished life--he's a country gentleman and a good soldier. Of course appearances can be deceiving. The story is narrated by John Dowell, an American. Dowell and his wife, Florence, meet the Ashburnams (Edward and his wife Leonora) in 1904 in the spa town of Bad Nauheim where both Edward and Florence are taking cures for bad hearts. The couple's lives will intermingle over the next nine years. We get to see into the private lives of four people--lives filled with lies, deceptions, even hatred.
I have read a few essays about this novel, and one author likened this story to a hall of mirrors--you can't believe what you see, or in this case hear. I really liked that description. The more I read, the more I became uncertain and at times confused as to the events being narrated. We only ever hear the story as it is being told by John Dowell, and we only hear the voices of other characters via Dowell's narration as well. After a while I wasn't sure I believed everything he was saying. Dowell doesn't narrate the story in a linear manner either. "The traditional English novel depended on the convention of the linear plot." Ford was writing in what is known as "literary impressionism". I came across this definition of literary impressionism in eNotes:
"Literary impressionism, Ford says, is a revolt against the commonplace nineteenth century novel, or 'nuvvle' as he calls it. The impressionist novel should not be a narration or report, but a rendering of impressions. Rather than following a linear plot, giving one event after another as they occur, the impressionist novel enters the mind of the storyteller and follows his associated ideas in a tangled stream of consciousness, so that vivid image becomes juxtaposed to vivid image, skipping across space and time in a collage of memory and imagination. The impressionist novel takes as its subject an affair, some shocking event which has already happened, and proceeds in concentric rings of growing complication as the storyteller cogitates. The focus of the novel is internal rather than external. The reader must focus on the storyteller's mental processes rather than on the events themselves. The impressionist novel is limited to the mind of the storyteller, and so is finally solipsistic."
Another critic has taken Ford's style a step further and compared The Good Soldier to a Cubist painting. I rather like this idea. I wish I could link to the article as it was very interesting reading; 
however, I found it in one of the library's databases. If you are very curious you can find the article, written by Frank G. Nigro, and published in the Winter 1992 issue of "Studies in the Novel". There was so much to think about in the article I can't even begin to paraphrase, but I can share a few quotes.
"Ford's The Good Soldier effectively mirrors what was happening in contemporary art: Ford created a pictorial, even cubist novel. 'Cubism' implies a profoundly radical, intellectual approach to art."
Nigro goes on to discuss the Cubist movement as defined by Picasso and Braque and its various phases (if you click on the link above, you can read more about Cubism). It is what they accomplished that interests me:
"...Cubist artists transformed painting into something other than painting: it became like the mythological Minotaur, half one thing and half another--the perfect mix of apples and oranges. Painting ceased being simply linear or two-dimensional and became actually three-dimensional."
"Drawing on the varying perspectives of Leonora, Florence and Edward, The Good Soldier also achieves a three-dimensionality, arising from the scattered shards of personal history, laid one on top of another. Dowell's narration represents a synthesis of different pieces of information on a tableau, yet it is not a synthesis that necessarily leads to a unity of meaning or interpretation. Like Cubism, The Good Soldier is a highly intellectualized project which has pretensions to objectivity but attempts to reach this objectivity--this new objectivity--through subjectivity. And like Cubism, Ford's novel would evoke a shrill reaction."
One more (well maybe two more), then I promise to stop quoting:
"Ford's method (the layering of events in a non-chronological manner) gives us a picture of broken images, of single shards of perspective, which if connected together like a child's dot-to-dot picture would form a Cubist painting. Ford uses this unstructured structure at first to disorient us, then to impress us, and finally to invoke our suspicion."
And this is what I felt reading the novel. Particularly the disorientation. I thought this was going to be a fairly simple tale, but it was anything but that. If you believe Dowell, perhaps it is all simple. However, even he continually tells us he doesn't quite know how to tell this tale, and is he telling us in the right way? After finishing the book and trying to digest it, I am still not certain what I think of any of the characters. I'm not sure if I feel sympathy or outright dislike. I still don't know what to make of Dowell. What sort of shocked me in my supplementary reading was this:
"It could be seriously argued that Edward, Leonora, and Florence have no external 'reality' at all, that they are simply the imaginings of the sickly Dowell as he tells or dreams his story. The approach may shock readers of conventional fiction, who are accustomed to reading a novel as if the characters in every fiction are simply the projections of the author's creative imagination."
Talk about unreliable narrator! I can see why this book is discussed and studied. It definitely calls for another reading some time in the future. Although the characters perplex me, I am fascinated by Ford's style of writing. How amazing to do with paper and ink what visual artists were doing with paint!
You can read more posts at The Slaves of Golconda blog, and feel free to join in or follow the discussion at The Metaxu Cafe.
The painting above right is by Braque called "Woman with a Guitar", 1913.