Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier

About The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) was a central figure in Anglo-American literary modernism — a prolific novelist, editor, and collaborator who co-wrote two novels with Conrad, edited The English Review (publishing early Lawrence, Hardy, and H.G. Wells), and later founded the Transatlantic Review (publishing early Hemingway, Joyce, and Pound). The Good Soldier (1915) is his masterpiece: a 250-page novel of unreliable narration about two couples whose nine years of companionable traveling conceals a series of affairs, suicides, and madnesses, told by John Dowell, an American narrator who is the last to understand what he is narrating. Parade's End (1924–1928), his four-novel sequence about Christopher Tietjens and the First World War, is equally admired and considerably longer. The Good Soldier is regularly cited as one of the finest examples of unreliable narration in English fiction and as a technical precursor to the formal innovations of Woolf and Joyce.