ology of The Good Soldier’, p.317 (6) ‘The Epistemology of The Good Soldier’, p. 313 The “time-shift” technique and the three-poi(2) nt “varying perspectives”(1) that Dowell has tangled, mentioned in the passage, allude to Frank G. Nigro’s ideology of “Dowell’s seeming incompetence, [which] Ford sought to show mistrust”(2) whereas I agree with Samuel Hynes that the “restricted and subjective narrative mode implies a more limited and tentative conception of the way man knows.”(3) I believe Dowell is untrustworthy as narrator but as a character he is the only unselfish one of the four, travelling to India to comfort Nancy thus ending up “very much where I started thirteen years ago.” I disagree with Nigro’s suggestion that “Dowell is hiding something.”(4) I agree with McCarthy that Dowell’s structured setting of events in the passage allude to “the action of the narrator’s mind as it gropes for meaning, the reality of what has occurred”(5) and to represent the shadows of conception rather than Dowell trying to superimpose his follies upon the reader. What does one really know of another? Is a pivotal issue of the novel, the answer Dowell gives us is: After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something of one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t. Dowell, after all his junctures has still achieved no greater mastery of what has occurred, and Ford illustrates this through Dowell’s recurrent undertaking to harmonize and illuminate events and their semiology. Ford adapts “novelistic tropes” (6) like language to disseminate a mood of nostalgia and inescapable serendipity. His kaleidoscopic narration and structure successfully denotes the darkness of human knowledge and the confinement of society. (1) Frank G. Nigro, p...
