FROM DISFIGURED TO TRANSFIGURED PAST: MEMORY AND HISTORY IN "THE GOOD SOLDIER"

Narration in The Good Soldier has been most noted for its disconnectedness and deliberate unreliability. Dowell not only comes out as an undependable story teller, but repeatedly highlights his own untrustworthiness through the novel. I wish to argue that Ford uses this flawed narrator as a tool to investigate the process of storytelling. Given the historical framework of the novel and the relentless focus on the Fourth of August date, the question of storytelling itself may be also considered as leading to a larger interrogation of the way in which history is written. My perspective is mainly informed by Ricœur's analysis of the relationship between time and narration, and between memory and history. It may indeed appear that Dowell in The Good Soldier establishes and explores a phenomenology of memory. In Time and Narrative, Ricœur examines the 'refiguration' of time via narration. This chapter contends that the unavoidable refiguration of the past, whilst it may initially appear as disfiguring truth, may ultimately be construed as a transfiguration which is in no way inferior to the original event. Ford intimates to us that in the awareness of the limits of recapturing time past through memory, which is key to his theory of literary impressionism, also lies an updated ethics of the narrative.