Narration and the Refiguration of Time in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
Résumé
The Good Soldier has been noted for the disconnectedness of the narrative and for the deliberate unreliability of Dowell, the teller of this ‘saddest story’. Ford, who was developing his theory of literary impressionism at the same time as he was writing The Good Soldier, designed a flawed narrator as a tool to investigate the process of storytelling and to question the authority of the narrative stance. The aim of this paper is to explore the role that the representation of time plays within this deconstruction of traditional storytelling. I first examine Ford’s take on writing history, before turning to Bergson and Ricœur in order to analyse the narrator Dowell’s rewriting of the past. Finally, Dowell’s compulsive cartography of time appears as a counterpoint to Ford’s ideal of an impressionist narration of time.