The Good Soldier: Knowing and Judging

215 THE GOOD SOLDIER ι KNOWING AND JUDGING By Walter G. Creed (University of Hawaii at Manoa) The Good Soldier is a novel of deception. Dowell's wife deceives him, so do the Ashburnhams. Dowell deceives himself, mostly because he wants to be deceived. And in telling his story, he deceives us as well. Compounding Dowell's deception is the author's ail-but-total disappearance from his novel. Ford has, so it seems, exercised so little control over his narrator that we know only what Dowell tells us. There is no implicit author standing in ironic relationship to the narrative; there are no clues - at least no unambiguous clues - tha.t would enable us to penetrate Dowell's deception and reveal the truths he obscures. For this reason, most critics have maintained that unless we go outside the novel and appeal to Ford's own ideas, interests, and biases, we can know little or nothing about the characters and events in ^ this novel, we can merely echo Dowell's cry, "It is all a darkness." But appeals to authority not only ignore Ford's remarkable success in creating an "impressionist" novel, they produce evidence as conflicting as Dowell's reversals in the first chapter. Ford's views as they relate or can be related to his novel are at best no more reliable than the judgments of his narrator. On the other hand, Dowell's plea of ignorance does not constitute a valid theory of knowledge for this novel. In fact, as I will try to show, we can know and judge the characters in The Good Soldier almost as well as we can know and judge the characters in more conventional novels; that is, with the assurance that our views are based on reasonably clear evidence in the text itself. "You have the facts for the trouble of finding them," Dowell tells us; "you have the points of view as far as I could ascertain or put them."3 And we do. It is up to us to sort them out and make sense of them. I will try to do just this, taking as my starting-point Dowell's self-deception and the psychological need it fulfills. A look at the "Protest" scene will make this need apparent; it will also reveal several of Dowell's narrative tactics and lead into a discussion of others. The incident takes place early in the Dowell-Ashburnham friendship, at the castle of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, where the draft of Martin Luther's Protest is displayed. Florence uses the occasion to speak her mind on Catholicism. As she talks, she lays "one finger upon Captain Ashburnham's wrist" (p. 44), and with this seemingly innocent gesture signals the beginning of a long affair. Immediately Dowell is "aware of something treacherous, something frightful, something evil in the day" (p. 44). When Leonora anxiously pulls him aside, he thinks "she must be a madly jealous woman - jealous of Florence and Captain Ashburnham, of all people in the world!" (p. 145), 216 Why does it not occur to Dowell that Florence might be insulting Leonora's religion? That he immediately thinks of jealously indicates how alert he is to the possibility of his wife's infidelity. Yet it is a possibility he would rather not make explicit, so he responds to Leonora's frenzied opening question - "don't you see what's going on?" - by assuming a self-protecting ignorance: "What's the matter? Whatever's the matter?" Leonora's reply is appropriately ambiguous: "Don't you see that that's the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them?" (p. 45). After a terrifying moment of indecision - "Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there" - Leonora immediately regains her composure. "And then suddenly she stopped, She was, most amazingly, just Mrs. Ashburnham again." The she announces "in her clear hard voice" that she is an Irish Catholic (p. 46). Dowell accepts this explanation, not because it rules out the possibility of an...