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Critical Analysis Of The Good Soldier Essay, Research Paper

The Good Soldier

A Critical Analysis by Amber Quickenden

Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier, utilizes a variety of literary techniques to construct meaning and propel imaginative power. Ford uses figurative language to initiate the polarity of “Convention and Passion”(1) and a divergent narrative style and structure to present cultural issues such as the quest for human knowledge and the imprisonment of society.

“The long afternoon wore on” commences in the context of Nancy’s revelations. She has read the account of the Brand divorce case in the newspapers and is apprehending the manifestations of recently discovered phenomena.

Ford employs a vocabulary that is mournful and dull to conjure up images of shadow and anguish. He uses words like “frightened,” “writhed,” “agony,” “pain” and “gloomy” to connote feelings of “affaissement.” These are juxtaposed with the vocabulary of the second half of the passage: “lover’s,” “flame,” and “cheerful” which signifies the corruption of Nancy’s chastised mind. Knowledge of convention takes “all sweetness…out of life.” The lexicogrammar interplays the theme of “Convention and Passion” as being unable to exist congruently in “the law of the land” and cognition of human nature as futile, leading only to darkness.

Ford expresses the degenerative nature of human passion in the metaphor:

a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence

wavered and melted into minor sounds as, beneath a bridge

the highlights on dark waters melt and waver and disappear

into black depths.

The anagoge alludes to images of passion fading into darkness. An antithesis of light and dark, black and white, the certitude of Passion succumbing to Convention:

Society must go on, I suppose, and society can

only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the

slightly-deceitful flourish, and if the passionate,

the headstrong, and the too truthful are condemned

(1) Samuel Hynes, ‘The Epistemology of The Good Soldier’, The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition (1995. W.W. Norton & Company), p. 315

to suicide and to madness.

Nancy’s love must regress, as the etiquette of society must prosper.

Fatally for those who were unable to conform to “the technicalities of

English life” due to burgeoning eroticisms, “the end was plainly manifest.”

Ford creates imagery of umbra and shadow elsewhere in the novel: “inevitably they pass away as the shadows across sundials.” Ford’s adumbrations of unillumination may also reflect the restrictions of human knowledge. Darkness reflects the tenuousness of human cognition. Dowell proposes earlier:

what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality

of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities?

It is all darkness.

Samuel Hynes agrees by stating: “we recognize an irresolvable pluralism of truths, in a world that remains essentially dark.” (1)

Further images of nebulousness are resonant when Nancy had “three weeks for introspection”

beneath gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered

darker by the fact that it lay in a hollow crowned

by fir trees with their black shadows.

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

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