ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an in-depth analysis of a seminal work of undecidability: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. It sheds light on the types and modes, uses and strategies, and functions and effects of undecidability in Ford’s work, with particular attention to how the production of meaning and of an overall philosophical and literary-theoretical vision is rooted in the undecidable narration of its extraordinary unreliable narrator. The chapter criticises the tendency to ‘mimetic reductionism’ in Ford criticism and argues for the value of acceptance of unresolvable narrative tension; it outlines the distinctive narrative strategy of disruption in the work; it looks at the theme of the heart and heart conditions in the work and determines ‘palpitation’ as its primary form and motif of undecidability; it brings to light the strong connection between The Good Soldier and Ford’s theoretical texts on literary impressionism; and it determines the literary intention and theoretical vision of the work as the development of a radical new form of literary realism.
