Реферат: Critical Analysis Of The Good Soldier Essay

The allusion purports to the restrictions of society encapsulating Nancy, and others, bounding them from their intimate desires. Convention is “a prison full of screaming hysterics.”

Thus, shadow and darkness totemize convention and flame and fire express passion and desire. Immediately Ford alliterates “the flames still fluttered.” Nancy’s passion prevails while “introspection” about desire and love pervades her. Nancy considered marriage as a “sacrament” and the burning logs once represented an “indestructible mode of life.” Now the world Nancy is absorbed in becomes embroiled in doubt and uncertainty. Ford exploits repetition in: “love was a flame,” and

“a man who was burning with inward flame” to reiterate fire signifying Passion.

The tone shifts after the passage, passion is extinguished by “the whole collections of rules:” “the fire had sunk to nothing…a mere glow amongst white ashes.” Eros has imminently subserved to convention.

(1) ‘The Epistemology of The Good Soldier’, p. 315

The tone of the passage is melancholic, morose and formidable. Ford formulates a mood of passion in retrogression like the “fading day.”

Time seems unyielding, passing tentatively and laboriously, reminiscent in “The long afternoon wore on” and “lolloped.” The ambience of fatalism is encircling all in Bramshaw Teleragh. They are without control over their predestined existence as Ford reiterates in the latter: “Not one of us has got what we really wanted.” Everything passionate and picturesque is proscripted to contraction as society imprisons them. Nancy has gained comprehension which amounts to her vexation and Leonora is realising she will never procure Edward’s love, thus a lachrymose and deranged mood blankets the household.

“The little cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall” resonates concupiscent desires. Ford constructs this elsewhere in the novel using an analogy of their “little four-square coterie” and “stepping a minuet.”

Dowell questions the consistency of human nature and agonises over why honest and pure beings are prevented from flourishing. “Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments…?” The “silly old tune” is Eros, candour and Nancy’s purity endeavouring to survive while preordained by society to degeneration.

The dialogue represents a juxtaposition of protagonists. Themes of antipathy and contraposition are conveyed through characterization. Nancy is unadulterated, chastised, innocent and na?ve: “If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward.” Leonora agonises over this: “Leonora writhed on her couch and called out: ‘Oh God’” The two characters are collated as “Passion and Convention”. Leonora is decorous and sustains the ideology of “good people” and “the law of the Church” but she is also described as being “cold.” Nancy’s uncontrollable desire is to fulfil her passions for a man whom she is forbidden. Ford resonates irony in the positioning of both figures, the chastised is doomed to failure and the “cold” is destined to prosper. The two characters present contrasted worldly views of the bourgeois ethic encompassing them. Both characters seek cognisance of society and other human souls.

We are reminded of Dowell’s narration when he postulates his narrative may be inadequate: “It is so difficult to keep all these people going.” He then continues to set out the events in “diary form.” Dowell “knows nothing until it is written down.” (1)

(1) Martin Stannard, The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition (1995 W.W. Norton & Company), preface, p.xi

It is knowledge, “knowledge of the human heart”(1) that Dowell seeks.

Dowell perpetually disorders his chronology and here he attempts to dictate order upon his diverging thoughts and emotions. McCarthy concurs Ford employs this technique to “construct an apparent bulwark of order against the chaotic conditions of life as he has come to know it.”(2) Frank G. Nigro proposes Ford’s “time-shift”(3) technique is “Dowell’s apparent need for structure.”(4) The attempt to impose order on the events by summarising them denotes directly here what the critics suggest, that Dowell is searching for a way to compose and embody the twisted affairs of the world enshrining him. Dowell strives to comprehend and find meaning in “the queer, shifty thing that is human nature.”

Ford uses a focalised point of view told retrospectively which alludes to the narrator being unreliable and untrustworthy, his knowledge of events is limited. This recurs throughout the novel with Dowell asking rhetorical questions: “what does one know and why is one here?” “Madness? Predestination? “Who the devil knows?” Evincing Dowell’s finite understanding induces the theme of the constraints of human perception. Samuel Hynes describes the rhetorical as “symbols of the difficulty of knowing.”(5)

Samuel Hynes also procures:

In a novel which postulates such severe limits

to human knowledge – a novel of doubt, that is,

in which the narrator’s fallibility is the norm –

the problem of authority cannot be settled directly,

because the question which authority answers ‘How

can we know what is true?’ is itself what the novel is

about. (6)

Dowell’s fallibility is delineated in “I have been casting back again.”

It asserts Dowell as undependable to relay information to the reader. As does Dowell’s incessant asking of the reader for their opinion of the versions of events he has given us: “I’ll leave it up to you.”

(1) ‘The Epistemology of The Good Soldier’, p.317

(2) Patrick A. McCarthy, ‘In search of lost time: Chronology and Narration in The Good Soldier’, English Literature in Transition (1997 Greensboro NC), p. 144

(3) John A. Meixner, ‘Ford’s Literary Technique’, The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition, p.257

(4) Frank G. Nigro, ‘Who Framed The Good Soldier? Dowell’s Story in Search of Form’, Studies in the Novel, Winter 1992, (Winter Dexton TX), p. 382