NOTE:- THIS IS AN UNCHECKED COPY OF THE ESSAY, WITH ALL THE TYPO'S AND ERRORS THAT THIS SUGGESTS. AND YES, I AM AWARE HOW MANY TIMES I USE THE WORD 'DISORIENTATING' BUT THANKS FOR POINTING IT OUT!
"I Have, I Believe, Told This Story To The Best Of My Ability"
The text of �The Good Soldier� is written from the point of view of John Dowell, an affluent American. He informs us in the first sentence that "This is the saddest story I ever heard.". Dowell relates his story as if we, the readers, were sitting in an armchair opposite him as he recounts a decade's worth of events to us. This would be a straightforward enough approach if it was not for the fact that Dowell is an extremely unreliable source.
The key difference between a text from the perspective of a 'character' and that of an omniscient narrator is point of view. The all-seeing narrator-as-deity doesn't tend to have one whereas Dowell is directly involved in the tale which he tells, even as he tries to hide this from his audience. We do not know whether Dowell is telling the truth, lying to us or simply incapable of giving us a reliable account because he is relying on hearsay. If we knew it was one of the latter two then we might not find it so disorientating but all of the information we recieve has been filtered through Dowell's interpretation or what Dowell wants us to comprehend as the truth.
Another disorientating aspect of the text is the seemingly random way in which the story is told. The narrator's mind seems to wander from event to event with no sense of order or structure and it up to us to fill in the gaps. Is Dowell incapable of telling his story in a linear way because he is trying to make sense of the events himself? Or is he actively trying to disorientate in order to keep us from the truth? In fact this might be the key to the whole text. The focus of the story that Dowell tells us is on his wife and the Ashburnhams and yet for the reader it is really the story of the narrator himself and his perception of events. Dowell wants to tell the story of them when what we are really reading might actually be the story of him. Dowell gives long, detailed descriptions of the personalities and motives of Florence, Leonora and Edward but rarely gives too much away about himself and yet this is quite revealing in itself. Dowell portrays himself almost as a neutral observer, watching unfolding events but not actively or emotionally involved. The problem here is that we, as the readers, can see a man who is so emotionally tangled up in the events he is relating that we cannot possibly trust his opinions and recollections. Dowell himself constantly uses phrases such as "It seemed to me..." and "As far as I remember...". How can we trust a narrator who is himself uncertain of his ability to tell the truth? Just how reliable, or not, Dowell's account of events are is open to interpretation by the reader. For instance Dowell's changing atittude to his wife. At first she is 'poor Florence' and later she is portrayed as the scheming and lying to avoid unwanted advances from her husband. Ultimatly she is blamed for Edwards downfall. Some of this may be true, but Dowell could also be manipulating us. He could be offering his opinions or what he claims to be the opinions of others as fact to absolve himself of any blame. But if Dowell is asking us to feel sympathetic for him potraying himself as cold and emotionless is a strange approach to take. There is a theme in the text, which reoccurs in several variations, of being tossed into the air. It is used in one scene where Dowell tells of an incident which illustrates his lack of empathy. Dowell, from the window of a train, sees two cows fighting. One manages to lock its horns under the other and tosses it into a stream. Dowell points out that although he should feel sympathetic to the animal he feels nothing. Not only does this suggest that Dowell himself is emotionless - and of course he might be telling us this to give that impression - this scene gives us an opportunity to see Dowell in the same way. He might be inviting us to feel nothing for him. We can laugh at the situation these four people are in, just as Dowell laughs at the cows, for they too are tossing each other into the air randomly. They are shuttlecocks, as Nancy Rufford puts it.
This lack of emotion that seems to be a part of Dowell's character leads into another interpretation of the text. There is the possibility that Dowell is a murderer. Dowell himself offers up the evidence. He refers to himself as Florence's nurse and we can see how he could have tricked her into poisoning herself. He tells us that he was the only witness to Edward's suicide and we see how he could have cut the mans throat. It is unsettling enough for the reader that their narrator is unreliable but it is shocking to realize that he may actually have murdered the people whose story he claims he is relating to us. Edward might be a good soldier but he is a weak man, a slave to his base instincts. Reading the text as the story of a double murder we might see that Dowell and Edward are, as the narrator himself puts it towards the end of the text 'Just alike'.
Ultimatly the use of an unreliable narrator to tell the story of 'The Good Soldier' creates a text which is a rich and multilayered reading experience. On one level, the level of the story that Dowell relates to us, it is 'a tale of passion' but we can also read it as a tale of deception and self-deception. If Dowell claims that those he put his trust in have lied to him then we might counter that we, as his readers, might be the victims of a deception too.
Miles Pieri