ABSTRACT
In 1948, Douglas Goldring challenged the suggestion made in a review of his biography of Ford, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, that Ford’s work suffered from total ‘critical neglect’. Greene’s sense of the legacy of The Good Soldier was mediated by his attitude towards Ford as a fellow practitioner. Goldring’s suggestion that Ford’s influence on Greene was primarily technical in nature also points to a more metatextual connection between the two novels. As Saunders points out, Ford’s first programmatic statements on Impressionism were made just as he was about to begin work on The Good Soldier, in the essays ‘Impressionism—Some Speculations’ and ‘On Impressionism’ Academic criticism of The Good Soldier began in the post-war period, heralded by Mark Schorer’s ‘The Good Novelist in The Good Soldier’. The intricacies of Dowell’s narration have made The Good Soldier an attractive case study for narrative theorists.
