‘I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down’: Uncooperative narration in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

Abstract

This article offers a pragmatic stylistic analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier, assessing the technical notion of ‘cooperation’ developed in Gricean theory as a means of explaining its distinctive narrative style. Critics have generally agreed this text offers a salient example of unreliable narration, but have differed significantly in how they judge the character of the narrator himself, and even in how they interpret the events of the novel. Grice characterises communicative exchanges as typically rational pieces of behaviour, in which a mutually accepted set of purposes guarantees that individual contributions are suitable and constructive, but he does also detail ways in which speakers may fail to fulfil these expectations. This article will analyse examples from the novel in which the relationship between narrator and reader might be characterised as uncooperative in specifically Gricean terms; the narrator faces a clash of conversational maxims, opts out of the maxims or violates them, rather than either adhering to them or flouting them for communicative effect. This suggests a way in which pragmatic literary stylistics might be able to offer a principled explanation of the idiosyncratic style of this canonical work of modernist fiction, and by extension of the effects of this style of narration on the reader.