Key themes
- The unreliable narrator and the story he tells himself
- Passion, repression and the Edwardian surface that conceals both
- Whether the narrator — or anyone — truly knows another person
About this book
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy - or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and y
Published in 1915, The Good Soldier is widely considered one of the finest English novels of the 20th century. Ford said he wanted to write the 'best French novel in the English language' — meaning a novel of formal precision and psychological depth.
Discussion questions
- John Dowell is one of fiction's great unreliable narrators — a man who tells us about betrayal without fully understanding his own complicity in it. What does Ford achieve through this specific form of unreliability?
- The novel's opening — 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard' — is deliberately ironic. How does the irony function across the novel's complete arc?
- The Edwardian world of good form and social surface is the novel's setting and its subject. What is Ford saying about the relationship between this surface and the desires it conceals?
- The four central characters destroy each other through passion and repression. Is the novel condemning their world, sympathetic to it, or simply anatomising it?
- The Good Soldier is technically very innovative — told non-chronologically, with the narrator discovering and rediscovering what he knows. How does this structure serve the novel's concerns?
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