searching for a way to compose and embody the twisted affairs of the world enshrining him. Dowell strives to comprehend and find meaning in “the queer, shifty thing that is human nature.” Ford uses a focalised point of view told retrospectively which alludes to the narrator being unreliable and untrustworthy, his knowledge of events is limited. This recurs throughout the novel with Dowell asking rhetorical questions: “what does one know and why is one here?” “Madness? Predestination? “Who the devil knows?” Evincing Dowell’s finite understanding induces the theme of the constraints of human perception. Samuel Hynes describes the rhetorical as “symbols of the difficulty of knowing.”(5) Samuel Hynes also procures: In a novel which postulates such severe limits to human knowledge - a novel of doubt, that is, in which the narrator’s fallibility is the norm - the problem of authority cannot be settled directly, because the question which authority answers ‘How can we know what is true?’ is itself what the novel is about. (6) Dowell’s fallibility is delineated in “I have been casting back again.” It asserts Dowell as undependable to relay information to the reader. As does Dowell’s incessant asking of the reader for their opinion of the versions of events he has given us: “I’ll leave it up to you.” (1) ‘The Epistemology of The Good Soldier’, p.317 (2) Patrick A. McCarthy, ‘In search of lost time: Chronology and Narration in The Good Soldier’, English Literature in Transition (1997 Greensboro NC), p. 144 (3) John A. Meixner, ‘Ford’s Literary Technique’, The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition, p.257 (4) Frank G. Nigro, ‘Who Framed The Good Soldier? Dowell’s Story in Search of Form’, Studies in the Novel, Winter 1992, (Winter Dexton TX), p. 382 (5) ‘The Epistem...
