From “The Saddest Story” to “A Tale of Passion”: Modernist Narrative Techniques and Themes in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
Abstract
Modernist British fiction has been customarily associated with a small group of authors, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Samuel Beckett and their experimental works. This highly exclusive view of modernism largely overshadowed the place and legacy of Ford Madox Ford, along with some of his contemporaries, in the history of modernist British fiction. Despite this neglect in critical trajectory, Ford’s works, in fact, anticipates the technical and thematic concerns of the modernist fiction in many ways. The aim of this paper is to explore Ford’s affinities with major modernist writers through a comprehensive analysis of his 1915 novel The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. The subtitle of the novel “A Tale Passion” provides the necessary critical framework for literary analysis with its implications about Ford’s theory of the novel. Accordingly, the first part of the article focuses on the narrative strategies inspired by the definition of ‘tale’ and explores how Ford’s impressionistic writing style challenges the established conventions of the nineteenth century realism. The second part discusses the way Ford employs the theme of destructive passion to explore the overarching themes of shifting sense of morality and class as well as the political turmoil in the pre-war period.
Keywords
Modernism, Impressionism, Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, Unreliable Narrator
References
- Arnold, Matthew (1949). “Dover Beach.” The Portable Matthew Arnold. Ed. Lionel Trilling. New York: Viking Press.
- Bradbury, Malcolm (1971). The Social Context of Modern English Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- Cuddon. J. A (1998). The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin.
- Flaubert, Gustav. (1963). “A Letter to George Sand” (16 December 1866). Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Ed. George J. Becker. Princeton: Princeton UP.
- Ford, Madox Ford (1990). The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. Oxford UP: Oxford, 1990.
- --- (1995). “On Impressionism.” The Good Soldier. The Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York. Norton.
- --- (1995). “Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford” (1927). The Good Soldier. The Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York. Norton.
- Hawthorn, Jeremy (1985). Studying Modern Novel: An Introduction. London: Arnold.
- Hoffmann, Charles (1967). Ford Madox Ford. Boston: Twayne, 1967.
- Hynes, Samuel (1961). “The Epistemology of The Good Soldier.” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 69, No. 2, 1961, pp. 225-235. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27540663, 16-03-2021.
