The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion is a novel by the English writer Ford Madox Ford, published in 1915. Originally titled The Saddest Story, it has been called "the best French novel in the English language," ranked 30th on the Modern Library's 100 Best English-language Novels of the 20th Century in 1998, and 13th on the BBC's 100 Greatest British Novels in 2015. The novel tells "the saddest story": John Dowell, a wealthy American, and his wife Florence meet the English gentleman Edward Ashburnham, "a good soldier" through and through, and his wife Leonora at the German spa town of Nauheim. The two couples maintain a seemingly respectable and harmonious friendship for nine years. Yet as Dowell's retrospective narration unfolds, the surface of civility and calm crumbles bit by bit: Florence's "heart condition" is a lie, Edward is constantly unfaithful, Leonora holds the marriage together with a Catholic's forbearance and need for control, and in the end Florence commits suicide, Edward cuts his throat, and Nancy goes mad. The novel uses first-person, chronologically disordered retrospective narration; Dowell is both observer and participant, and his account is full of hesitation, self-justification and self-deception, making him a classic example of the "unreliable narrator." Ford uses an impressionistic, collage-like technique to let the truth emerge gradually through fragmented impressions, profoundly revealing the hypocrisy of marriage, the loss of control of desire, and the darkness of human nature.