contraposition are conveyed through characterization. Nancy is unadulterated, chastised, innocent and nave: “If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward.” Leonora agonises over this: “Leonora writhed on her couch and called out: ‘Oh God’” The two characters are collated as “Passion and Convention”. Leonora is decorous and sustains the ideology of “good people” and “the law of the Church” but she is also described as being “cold.” Nancy’s uncontrollable desire is to fulfil her passions for a man whom she is forbidden. Ford resonates irony in the positioning of both figures, the chastised is doomed to failure and the “cold” is destined to prosper. The two characters present contrasted worldly views of the bourgeois ethic encompassing them. Both characters seek cognisance of society and other human souls. We are reminded of Dowell’s narration when he postulates his narrative may be inadequate: “It is so difficult to keep all these people going.” He then continues to set out the events in “diary form.” Dowell “knows nothing until it is written down.” (1) (1) Martin Stannard, The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition (1995 W.W. Norton & Company), preface, p.xi It is knowledge, “knowledge of the human heart”(1) that Dowell seeks. Dowell perpetually disorders his chronology and here he attempts to dictate order upon his diverging thoughts and emotions. McCarthy concurs Ford employs this technique to “construct an apparent bulwark of order against the chaotic conditions of life as he has come to know it.”(2) Frank G. Nigro proposes Ford’s “time-shift”(3) technique is “Dowell’s apparent need for structure.”(4) The attempt to impose order on the events by summarising them denotes directly here what the critics suggest, that Dowell is ...
