The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [3]
Ashburnham is most certainly a bit of a mystery, but Dowell is English literature’s most fascinating enigma. Paradoxically, the more gushingly he idolizes the errant ex-soldier and the more contradictory his appraisals of the other main characters turn out to be, the more urgently we feel the need to fathom not them but him. Whether Leonora is at heart a frigid and malevolent harpy or whether her humanity has dwindled with her marriage will be for the reader to decide; and whether the wayward Florence Dowell, admittedly a bit of a ‘riddle’, is really a scheming temptress or simply an opportunist who exploits Dowell’s perverse determination to marry her in order to resume her affair with the Europe-bound Jimmy, is similarly open to question. But coming to terms with Dowell himself is far more exacting. ‘I don’t know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to this story,’ he remarks at the beginning of Part Three, but he could not be more mistaken. Ultimately, depending on how Dowell’s relationships with Florence, Leonora, Nancy and Ashburnham are configured; on how the reader interprets the various relationships amongst these last four and, above all, on whether the reader sees Dowell as ‘an American millionaire of exaggerated density’6 or a more switched-on and manipulative story-teller, seemingly intent on hiding rather than revealing the truth, ‘analysis of [his]… psychology’ is probably the only reliable angle from which the novel may be approached. So much so, that some critics have recommended that we subject Dowell not only to the closest scrutiny, but that we ‘assume an unrelievedly critical attitude toward everything he tells us and keep our eye on him at every moment, or the story gets away from us’.7 To focus on Dowell is not to lose sight of other aspects of the text but to accept that without him there would be no other aspects of the text.
It is rich, in a novel powered forward by perfidy, passion and lies, that four of the five main characters – Ashburnham, Leonora, Florence and Nancy – have blue eyes: traditionally, blue has symbolized truth, loyalty, constancy, chastity, piety and fidelity.8 And while it is appropriate that the righteous Leonora has always looked at her best ‘in a blue tailor-made’, it is thumpingly ironic that the only dress of Florence’s that Dowell can remember is ‘a very simple one of blue figured silk’. The narrator, we should remember, favours ties of a ‘special shade of blue’, but whether his preferred colour is apt or not is more difficult to say, not least because his ironizing self-consciousness makes it almost impossible, at times, to decide where, if anywhere, his honesty and sincerity lie. We never discover the colour of Dowell’s eyes, and the only thing we do know about his appearance is that he is on the short side. We sit opposite him, as he imagines, but we can’t see him. Like T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (who also made his debut before the reading public in 1915), Dowell is ‘Natty, precise, well-brushed’, conscious of his lack of stature, and faceless.
Nor is it any easier to hold his story with confidence, and more than one critic, confronted with the task of trying to make sense of the text’s many complexities and confusions, has laid the blame squarely at the feet of Dowell the dodo. The Good Soldier, the argument goes, narrated by a ‘leisured American’ of the belle époque, is a slow-paced tale, punctuated with longeurs, recapitulations, inconsistencies, errors and corrections, and that, for the most part, is because the narrator is slow. He must be formidably dense and dull-witted, readers have argued, because how else is it possible to be the odd man out in a close foursome for nine years? How could he know the other three with ‘extreme intimacy’, be an integral part of’an acquaintanceship… as close as a good glove’s with your hand’, and yet not realize that