ABSTRACT
Passion for John Dowell is not limited to the sexual instinct; indeed, he virtually dismisses it as counting "very little in a great passion". Samuel Hynes has made an excellent argument for the reliability of Dowell's knowledge of the conflict between Passion and Convention in "The Epistemology of The Good Soldier". The Good Soldier belongs in the company of modernist works in which the moral sensibility is challenged beyond its capacities. Unable to revise itself to explain and master what it contemplates, it experiences an unresolvable ambivalence. As with Death in Venice and The Good Soldier ambivalence is present in both theme and point of view. Sigmund Freud invested ambivalence with its current authority and familiarity by making it perhaps the most prominent word in the symptomatology of neuroses. Ambivalence in its intenser expressions may become the torment of indecision and emotional turmoil.
