Other editions of book The Good Soldier

THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

The Good Soldier is a story about the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples—one English, one American—and the growing awareness of American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian façade. It is Dowells attitude—his puzzlement, uncertainty, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration—that makes the book so powerful and mysterious. In Fords brilliantly woven tale, nothing is quite what it seems. Despite its catalog of death, insanity, and despair, this novel has many comic moments and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. Originally published in 1915, The Good Soldier is considered by many to be Ford Madox Fords masterpiece.

MP3 CD FormatTwo couples, two marriages both are seemingly perfect, both are falling apart. Beneath the surface gentility of American John Dowell with his wife Florence and the landed grace of Edward and Leonora lie fictions and deceit. There are secret desires, hidden power-games, suicides, and madness. Everyone is hiding something; even the narrator can t be trusted. Brilliantly inventive, tragic, and ironic, The Good Soldier is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion has been called the perfect novel, and "one of the 15 or 20 best novels produced in English in our [20th] century". Ford contrasts perception verses reality masterfully as he portrays two perfect couples through the narrative of the cuckold American husband, Dowell, a classic unreliable narrator. The Ashburnhams, a perfect upper middle class English couple, haven't spoken to each other in private for years. Teddy Ashburnham, the "Perfect Soldier", and seducer of Florence, eases the frustration of a sexless marriage through a series of affairs, which the wife, Leonora, overlooks until his dalliance with Florence, whom she can't stand. Dowell assumes the position of nursemaid to Florence, who convinced him on their wedding night that her heart is too weak for sexual excitement. Two wealthy couples, one English and one American, meet at a spa in Germany and spend several years in comfortable friendship until it is revealed that the American wife and the English husband are carrying on an affair that the English wife knows about but the American husband does not. After the deaths of the adulterers, more and more is uncovered about both the conduct and emotional meaning of the affair. The story, narrated by the American husband, is in some sense a detective story, but he is no investigator. The facts come to him unwillingly, since he would prefer not to know. The suspense depends not on what happened, but on the narrator's interpretation of the powerful emotions manifested in very small gestures and remarks.

'The Good Soldier', set just before World War I, chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham - the soldier to whom the title refers - and his own seemingly perfect marriage and that of two American friends. 'The Good Soldier' is narrated by John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the stories of those dissolutions as well as the deaths of three characters and the madness of a fourth.