ABSTRACT
The Good Soldier looks like a realist first-person narrative. Indeed, Greene reread it and Great Expectations before embarking on The End of the Affair, to accustom himself to the limitations of first-person perspective, only to find that he needed other points of view to complicate Bendrix's interpretation of the facts. The Good Soldier, then, is a fascinating text to examine when discussing the form of the modern novel because it can shift between classifications: realist; Impressionist; modernist; postmodern. Karen Hoffmann discusses Dowell's sense of inferiority being an American: By creating an American narrator who aspires to be British, Ford can examine Dowell's anxieties in relation to specific intersections of nationality, class, and gender. Dowell's wild protestations about Catholics are precisely the sort of statements that can make him seem unreliable. When Dowell thinks about Ashburnham, he thinks of him in images of absurdity.
