Author(s): Ford Madox Ford

Classics

First published in 1915, Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" begins, famously and ominously, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." In a nutshell, "The Good Soldier" us the post-mortem of a good-on-paper marriage that much later turned out to be even less than the little the narrator thought of it. The book actually describes fully the needs of a person to be acknowledged and the consequences of acknowledging the fullness of another. The non-affair that kills Edward really only hurts him because he acknowledges something that had probably been building for a while, but harmlessly while it went unnoticed. Acknowledgement is really the driving force behind the novel, both in the positive and negative aspects. The impetus of the narrator's story is his final acceptance of what his marriage really was, an acknowledgement of his wife's true nature. Though the main characters seem at times like unsympathetic twits, readers (once started) will be hard-pressed to put this book down.