John Dowell’s confusing narration is so frustrating. I would surely need to read The Good Soldier five more times before comprehending at least half of this novel, which resulted in my habitual silence in class discussions. However, I don’t have time to read it five times over because I have an appointment with the probate court to legally change my name to Kasena C. Kasena. So, I will attempt to enlighten myself with my own writing and you fine folks at the other end of the computer screen can (and should) let me know where I need a little guidance.
John gives me a sense of unease because he is as insane, if not more so, than the other characters in the book. However, we have no outside opinion of this because he is the voice of the novel. Ford shows John’s deterioration as the novel progresses, because at first he seems fairly normal and a little cynical. As John continues his narration, his cynicism gets worse (as it should considering Florence’s bad behavior), but his emotions dissipate. I don’t know about everyone else, but if I found out my spouse lied to me about a heart condition so he didn’t have to sleep with me, I might end up with the same vocabulary as Nancy at the end of the novel, minus the “shuttle.” Where is John’s anger? He claims to hate Florence, yet there are no concrete signs of his frustrations, emotional or physical. John Dowell should be a priest.
John’s lack of chronology really attests to his overall confusion about the entire nine years that have passed with Florence. He writes in a stupor, completely blinded by his past views of the world, even though they have been proven false by the actions of Florence, Edward, and Leonora. His focus seems to be on finding some kind of truth, but he lacks any ability whatsoever to understand that people are not always directly honest. He takes every backwards remark made by another character as some kind of accidental word vomit, as if these people could not possibly be intentionally trying to hurt him or anyone else. In that case, I must have met a lot of people in my day that had ipecac with their alphabet soup.
I do pity poor John. He seems too trusting and naïve to be a product of the same generation as Edward, Florence, and Leonora. Did his mother shelter him from the realities of the world? Or is John really so dense that he is completely impervious to the words and actions of his friends and wife? I really think it’s the latter. Seeing as John’s mother is a woman, she probably had some indication of the subtleties of language. No offense men, but I do study speech pathology as a second major and women are more attentive to paralinguistic and nonlinguistic features. Therefore, I am placing no blame on John’s mother and all blame on John. He provides readers with several examples of his inability to interpret human intent based on body language, facial expressions, pragmatics, or any other number of indications of emotion that the characters generously provide to him, and mommy can’t be there to interpret every sentence for him!
Any time someone expresses distress in the novel, John misreads or ignores it. When Leonora hints to John about the affair between Edward and Florence, John asks Florence to “accept the situation” to which she replies, “Oh, I accept the situation, if you can” (78-9). Only after John is aware of the affair does he realize she repeats the phrase with a “gravity too intense” (80). Is there really a whole lot more John wants Leonora to do to point out the affair besides coming out and saying it? Should she rent a billboard or something? In fact, the only way he did finally realize the affair is when Leonora directly said, “…isn’t it odd to think that if your wife hadn’t been my husband’s mistress, you would probably never have been here at all?” John then wrote, “That was how I got the news—full in the face, like that” (124). Here, he pretty much tells us what a dense moron he is.
Just pages later, Leonora addresses that Florence committed suicide, which had “never entered [his] head” prior to that time (126). Seriously? He saw his wife just moments before she took the plunge! I’d like to think a normal reaction, if her supposed heart condition were causing some kind of attack and she wanted to LIVE, would have been asking for a doctor. Also, after several years of marriage, I assume this is the first time John would have seen Florence this upset unless she is a dramatic actress. Before entering her room, maybe John should’ve called for a doctor. Where is the doctor in this scene!?
Between these two instances of John’s idiocy, which I could have found by randomly flipping to a page and pointing to a paragraph, I get a real sense of John Dowell’s inability to be a reliable narrator simply because he doesn’t have the capability to understand language beyond it’s most literal meaning when looking straight at a peculiar circumstance. Given that this entire novel is about a peculiar circumstance of love, I can’t tell whether to continue to be frustrated with John’s naïveté, or laugh at his proclamation that this is the saddest story he’s every heard (7). I choose to laugh, because John foolishly blames the women at the end of the novel, whereas I just think he’s deluded.
I found that lovely image of a shuttlecock here: http://www.utne.com/blogs/blog.aspx?blogid=32&tag=Arts
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