Writing the saddest chronicleFord Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier"

Abstract

The Good Soldier is told by John Dowell, one of the most famous unreliable narrators in English literature. Dowell reflects on a period of time (1904-1913) and on the traumas and fears of his generation: they were afraid of women and of the loss of masculine power. Ford Madox Ford associates the disintegration of two couples' lives with the wide course of history. My aim in this paper is to interpret this novel as a modernist chronicle. The chronicle as a genre includes features of the writing of history, the subgenre of "life-writing" and the journalistic chronicle. We may also find a mixture of fiction and autobiography in modernist chronicles. They lack the authority of historical writing, but display the authority of the writer/observer from his/her personal perspective, and add a sense of modernity through the formal subversion of narrative codes and generic limits, the absence of narrative closure, and the inclusion of digressions.