Ford :: essays papers

Ford The Good Soldier, utilises a variety of literary techniques to construct meaning and propel imaginative power. Ford uses figurative language to initiate the polarity of â€Å"Convention and Passion†(1) and a divergent narrative style and structure to present cultural issues such as the quest for human knowledge and the imprisonment of society. â€Å"The long afternoon wore on† commences in the context of Nancy’s revelations. She has read the account of the Brand divorce case in the newspapers and is apprehending the manifestations of recently discovered phenomena. Ford employs a vocabulary that is mournful and dull to conjure up images of shadow and anguish. He uses words like â€Å"frightened,† â€Å"writhed,† â€Å"agony,† â€Å"pain† and â€Å"gloomy† to connote feelings of â€Å"affaissement.† These are juxtaposed with the vocabulary of the second half of the passage: â€Å"lover’s,† â€Å"flame ,† and â€Å"cheerful† which signifies the corruption of Nancy’s chastised mind. Knowledge of convention takes â€Å"all sweetness†¦out of life.† The lexicogrammar interplays the theme of â€Å"Convention and Passion† as being unable to exist congruently in â€Å"the law of the land† and cognition of human nature as futile, leading only to darkness. Ford expresses the degenerative nature of human passion in the metaphor: a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into minor sounds as, beneath a bridge the highlights on dark waters melt and waver and disappear into black depths. The anagoge alludes to images of passion fading into darkness. An antithesis of light and dark, black and white, the certitude of Passion succumbing to Convention: Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly-deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too truthful are condemned Samuel Hynes, ‘The Epistemology of The Good Soldierâ⠂¬â„¢, The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition (1995. W.W. Norton & Company) to suicide and to madness. Nancy’s love must regress, as the etiquette of society must prosper. Fatally for those who were unable to conform to â€Å"the technicalities of English life† due to burgeoning eroticisms, â€Å"the end was plainly manifest.† Ford creates imagery of umbra and shadow elsewhere in the novel: â€Å"inevitably they pass away as the shadows across sundials.† Ford’s adumbrations of unillumination may also reflect the restrictions of human knowledge. Darkness reflects the tenuousness of human cognition. Dowell proposes earlier: what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities?