James Somers

“Dowell Did It”: The Narrator as Cover in The Good Soldier

As Captain Edward Ashburnham’s “holy peace” crumbles, his mind seized by the simple note on that slip of pinkish paper, we turn, eager for some insight, to our esteemed narrator Mr. John Dowell.[1] His report: “He just looked up to the roof of the stable, as if he were looking to Heaven, and whispered something that I did not catch” (293). With that, one of our best clues to Edward’s suicide has been forever lost—a troubling omission from an account that is already turbid and confused. So it goes when you get your plot details from a man who, for nine years, failed to realize that his wife’s heart condition was made up, and that she, along with every other one of his friends, was an adulterer. But we would be remiss if we pinned our predicament on Dowell alone: incomplete information, bias, and privileged frames are features of any text, not just ones with occasionally forgetful narrators. In fact, there is a way in which we should be grateful for our guide—at least Dowell knows he’s unreliable, and his constant reminders of that fact may incline us against taking what he says as the record of a real moment.

It’s worth asking, however, if Dowell’s bumbling is instead (or also) a front, a way for Ford to infuse his novel with “cheap sentimentality” and classic melodrama (the kind of material that sells copies) without losing a more sophisticated audience. That is, maybe Ford is able to attribute to Dowell, his capricious narrator, whatever banalities, clichés, or inconsistencies his most astute readers might find. The best evidence for such a claim—that Ford uses his narrator, among other things, as cover—would be places where Dowell interrupts the actual story, but where his interruption plausibly serves no other purpose than to apologize for the style, arrangement, pace, accuracy, etc., of his telling. These would stand in contrast to those other “meta moments” where we do learn something substantive about Dowell-as-character. Examples of the first kind are more insidious because they are more likely to be just “soft sells,” or attempts to gain our trust or lower our expectations.[2] They would thereby be more useful as a means to deflect criticism (leveled either at Dowell or at Ford) than as data about Dowell the man, and hence we could locate them “outside” or “above” the novel—operating in Ford’s world (ours, too) instead of the Ashburnhams’.

Just as one’s posture, inflection, and eye movements can set the tone in a conversation, arguably carrying as much information as one’s actual remarks, so can Dowell’s choices as narrator illuminate aspects of his character. In that sense they often function as part of the diegesis. The most straightforward cases might be where he describes himself directly, like when he laments “I know nothing—nothing in the world—of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone,” or claims to be a fast judge of character: “I have generally found that my first impressions were correct enough” (11, 179). Here Dowell is trying to expose his personality, in much the same way that he might expose Edward’s or Florence’s. Not surprisingly, he has trouble forming a coherent picture. He is alternately detached—“You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband [. . .] It is not my business to think about it”—and (angrily) engaged: “I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness” (81-83). At times he seems self-assured, like when he sees one cow toss another, as though he means to leave his friends in their small world (he was “pleased to be off duty”), and to bring us in on the joke (50). But elsewhere he craves approval: “we are all so alone,” he says, “we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist” (136).[3] We thus learn not to trust his mild jokes about “English society,” or his wisecracks about the way things are in Philadelphia, because we know how much he wants to be accepted and how (by his own admission) he “never had anybody to deal with except waiters and chambermaids and the Ashburnhams” (178). When we consider the novel as a whole, then, we learn not to trust Dowell, that he is, in a word, erratic, and that if nothing else The Good Soldier is a portrait of his fluctuating sense of self.

But we must recognize that he plays a role, for Ford, beyond mere character. Though it may not figure prominently, there is a kind of metadiegetic “story within a story” here: that of the author “at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage” trying to stitch a tale together (17).

And in this capacity, too, Dowell is unfailingly himself. That is, even as narrator he is uncertain and insecure, eager to participate but unsure of how to do it. He will generalize and then say “I don’t attach any particular importance to these generalizations of mine [. . .] I am only an ageing American with very little knowledge of life” (281). Or he will inform us that he doesn’t know what a letter contained, but insist on calling it “amazing and horrible,” and inferring that “it must have seemed [. . .] like the laughter of a devil”; we don’t upbraid him for making such a dramatic impression, just for doing it under the guise of objectivity (243). We know too well that he invents his details on occasion, like when Edward “had gone with her into that dark park with no quickening of the pulse,” and so his claims to the contrary—“I don’t know what it contained” or “I am not going to make up speeches”—carry little weight; if anything they support our impression of Dowell as a man who tries too hard, who hasn’t the will to match his wants (131, 245). The result (to put it harshly): as a character he ends up grasping at some pathetically incomplete version of the woman he loves, and so it is, as a narrator, with the truth.

There is some complexity here. It is not just that Dowell is working on two levels—diegetic and “metadiegetic”—but that they interact. So what we learn about him via the plot, say, that he once moved to England with Florence or chose to marry Nancy, can change our impression of his narration (because it changes our impression of him). Similarly, when we encounter two incongruous accounts—a feature of the narration itself—we’re forced to reinterpret events and characters. These “level-crossing feedback loops”[4] are important because they create a living text, one that changes as we read it.

With that in mind, we can join Ford in appreciating “the intricate tangle of references and cross-references” that comprises his novel (3). We could even go so far as to argue that Dowell’s flashbacks, his bad memory, and his tendency to inhabit other people’s points of view all capably challenge the idea of an objective truth, and that The Good Soldier thereby achieves Ford’s modernist aims by problematizing the novel as narrative. Thus aspects of the book that look like products of sloppy craftsmanship—its (apparently) haphazard chronology, or descriptions that ramble—would in this view be intentional gambits by Ford that enrich the story and its characters.

But before we can make such an assertion, we ought to examine the evidence against it, namely, those “meta moments” that seem to do more for Ford than Dowell. See, for instance, when our narrator tells us

I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. (213)

Or

I have been casting back again; but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. [. . .] I wish I could put it down in diary form. (256)

For a moment we are relieved: “There’s a reason this thing is so hard to follow, and it’s not my fault!” But we quickly find a scapegoat in Dowell: we blame him for our frustration. Our reaction makes sense only because we have learned to distrust him, because he has failed us so often before.[5] If that hadn’t been the case, we might attack Ford—we might consider “I cannot help it” a lame excuse for carelessness. But because we have been trained to separate Ford and Dowell, to think of one as the other’s creation, we instead praise the real-world author, not just for adding this interesting dynamic, but for adding it intentionally; thus when we laugh off our frustration, we are laughing with Ford.

We can make a case against him, though.[6] To do so we need not claim that Dowell’s voice is actually Ford’s, nor that this interleaving of the narrator in the diegesis was some accident; we need only show that it is plausible that he, in addition to playing with Dowell in a very modern way, added these “apology” passages to shield himself against a certain kind of criticism.

Suppose, for the sake of this argument, that Ford decides next time around to omit Dowell’s self-conscious plaints about his narrative style, and consider what would happen. For one, all of those reflections of Dowell’s that add so much to his character, both for what they say directly and what we can infer from them in context—“I, for instance, am a rather greedy man,” for example—would survive (139). So would his unreliability. We would still notice his incongruities, his pathetic marriage, his sometimes incredible naiveté. Even his self-awareness would remain—his narrative voice wouldn’t fade because we would still have those passages where he interjects as a writer: “I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the words that end my last chapter” or “I call this the Saddest Story, rather than ‘The Ashburnham Tragedy,’ just because …” (268-269, 192). In fact, all that we would lose would be a reason to fight Ford for the unfavorable features of his novel. But as it stands, whatever we say to that effect can be disarmed. Someone need only point to those passages and say, “Dowell did it.” The author is spared, if not lauded, and we go back, our critical eye appeased, to enjoying the saddest story.[*]

1

1. Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 288. Hereafter cited in the text.

2. Compare these common maneuvers: “I’m not a great judge of white wines, actually, but I can recommend a few reds…” (gains trust), or: “I haven’t played in months, you know, and my backhand has always had kinks, so don’t be surprised if I lose the first few games…” (lowers expectations).

3. The “outside” here is interesting: is Dowell talking about us, his “silent listener” (213), or his contemporaries? The question might take us too far afield, so we will move on…

4. A wonderful phrase due to Douglas Hofstadter, a researcher in Artificial Intelligence and the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979).

5. See the discussion above.

6. It’s worth stressing that this point is conditional—“if we were to make the case for ‘Dowell as cover,’ here is how we might do it.”

[*]This is not to say, even if our “attack” had merit, that Ford would have included these passages in order to deflect retribution—just that he might have been tempted to do so, and that they would have served that purpose.