FREE ESSAY ON FORD ESSAY

FORD ESSAY

The Good Soldier, utilises 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. The tone of
the passage is melancholic, morose 
(1) 'The Epistemology of The Good Soldier', p. 315 
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 juxtaposition of protagonists.
Themes of antipathy and contraposition are conveyed through characterization. Nancy is
unadulterated, chastised, innocent and naive: "If I married anyone I should want him to
be like Edward." Leonora agonises over this: "Leonora writhed on her couch and called
out: 'Oh God'" The two characters are collated as "Passion and Convention". Leonora is
decorous and sustains the ideology of "good people" and "the law of the Church" but she
is also described as being "cold." Nancy's uncontrollable desire is to fulfil her
passions for a man whom she is forbidden. Ford resonates irony in the positioning of both
figures, the chastised is doomed to failure and the "cold" is destined to prosper. The
two characters present contrasted worldly views of the bourgeois ethic encompassing them.
Both characters seek cognisance of society and other human souls. We are reminded of
Dowell's narration when he postulates his narrative may be inadequate: "It is so
difficult to keep all these people going." He then continues to set out the events in
"diary form." Dowell "knows nothing until it is written down." (1) (1) Martin Stannard,
The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition (1995 W.W. Norton & Company), preface, p.xi 
It is knowledge, "knowledge of the human heart"(1) that Dowell seeks. Dowell perpetually
disorders his chronology and here he attempts to dictate order upon his diverging
thoughts and emotions. McCarthy concurs Ford employs this technique to "construct an
apparent bulwark of order against the chaotic conditions of life as he has come to know
it."(2) Frank G. Nigro proposes Ford's "time-shift"(3) technique is "Dowell's apparent
need for structure."(4) The attempt to impose order on the events by summarising them
denotes directly here what the critics suggest, that Dowell is searching for a way to
compose and embody the twisted affairs of the world enshrining him. Dowell strives to
comprehend and find meaning in "the queer, shifty thing that is human nature." Ford uses
a focalised point of view told retrospectively which alludes to the narrator being
unreliable and untrustworthy, his knowledge of events is limited. This recurs throughout
the novel with Dowell asking rhetorical questions: "what does one know and why is one
here?" "Madness? Predestination? "Who the devil knows?" Evincing Dowell's finite
understanding induces the theme of the constraints of human perception. Samuel Hynes
describes the rhetorical as "symbols of the difficulty of knowing."(5) Samuel Hynes also
procures: In a novel which postulates such severe limits to human knowledge - a novel of
doubt, that is, in which the narrator's fallibility is the norm - the problem of
authority cannot be settled directly, because the question which authority answers 'How
can we know what is true?' is itself what the novel is about. (6) Dowell's fallibility is
delineated in "I have been casting back again." It asserts Dowell as undependable to
relay information to the reader. As does Dowell's incessant asking of the reader for
their opinion of the versions of events he has given us: "I'll leave it up to you." 
(1) 'The Epistemology of The Good Soldier', p.317 (2) Patrick A. McCarthy, 'In search of
lost time: Chronology and Narration in The Good Soldier', English Literature in
Transition (1997 Greensboro NC), p. 144 (3) John A. Meixner, 'Ford's Literary Technique',
The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition, p.257 (4) Frank G. Nigro, 'Who Framed The Good
Soldier? Dowell's Story in Search of Form', Studies in the Novel, Winter 1992, (Winter
Dexton TX), p. 382 (5) 'The Epistemology of The Good Soldier', p.317 (6) 'The
Epistemology of The Good Soldier', p. 313 The "time-shift" technique and the three-poi
(2) nt "varying perspectives"(1) that Dowell has tangled, mentioned in the passage,
allude to Frank G. Nigro's ideology of "Dowell's seeming incompetence, [which] Ford
sought to show mistrust"(2) whereas I agree with Samuel Hynes that the "restricted and
subjective narrative mode implies a more limited and tentative conception of the way man
knows."(3) I believe Dowell is untrustworthy as narrator but as a character he is the
only unselfish one of the four, travelling to India to comfort Nancy thus ending up "very
much where I started thirteen years ago." I disagree with Nigro's suggestion that "Dowell
is hiding something."(4) I agree with McCarthy that Dowell's structured setting of events
in the passage allude to "the action of the narrator's mind as it gropes for meaning, the
reality of what has occurred"(5) and to represent the shadows of conception rather than
Dowell trying to superimpose his follies upon the reader. What does one really know of
another? Is a pivotal issue of the novel, the answer Dowell gives us is: After forty-five
years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to
know something of one's fellow beings. But one doesn't. Dowell, after all his junctures
has still achieved no greater mastery of what has occurred, and Ford illustrates this
through Dowell's recurrent undertaking to harmonize and illuminate events and their
semiology. Ford adapts "novelistic tropes" (6) like language to disseminate a mood of
nostalgia and inescapable serendipity. His kaleidoscopic narration and structure
successfully denotes the darkness of human knowledge and the confinement of society. (1)
Frank G. Nigro, p.382 (2) Frank G. Nigro, p.383 (3) Samuel Hynes, p.311 (4) Frank G.
Nigro, p.385 (5) Patrick A. McCarthy, p.312 (6) Frank G. Nigro, p.383