' The Good Soldier' Summary

The Good Soldier is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the story of those dissolutions, plus the deaths of three characters and the madness of a fourth, in a rambling, non-chronological fashion. As an unreliable narrator the reader can consider whether they believe Dowell and his description of how the events unfolded including his own role in the "saddest story ever told".

Events as narrated

The novel opens with the famous line: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Dowell explains that for nine years he, his wife Florence and their friends Captain Edward Ashburnham (the "good soldier" of the book's title) and his wife Leonora, had an ostensibly normal friendship while Edward and Florence sought treatment for their heart ailments at a spa in Nauheim, Germany.

As it turns out, nothing in the relationships or in the characters is as it first seems. Florence's heart ailment is a fiction she perpetrated on John to ensure that he did not seek intimacy from her as it would seemingly be too stressful for her heart, and so to keep him out of her bedroom at night in order that she could continue her affair with an American artist named Jimmy. Edward and Leonora have an imbalanced marriage broken by his constant infidelities (both of body and heart) and by Leonora's attempts to control Edward's affairs (both financial and romantic). Dowell is an innocent who is coming to realise how much he has been fooled as Florence and Edward had an affair under his nose for nine years without his knowing until Florence was dead.

Dowell tells the story of Edward and Leonora's relationship which appears normal to others but which is a power struggle that Leonora wins. Dowell narrates several of Edward's affairs and peccadilloes including his possibly innocent attempt to comfort a crying servant on a train, his affair with the married Maisie Maidan, the one character in the book whose heart problem was unquestionably real, and his bizarre tryst in Monte Carlo and Antibes with a kept woman known as La Dolciquita. Edward's philandering ends up costing them a fortune in bribes, blackmail and gifts for his lovers leading Leonora to take control of Edward's financial affairs. She gradually gets him out of debt.

Florence's affair with Edward leads her to commit suicide when she realises both that Edward is falling in love with his and Leonora's young ward, Nancy Rufford, and that Dowell has found out about her affair with Jimmy. Florence sees Edward and Nancy in an intimate conversation and rushes back to the resort where she sees John talking to a man she used to know (and who knows of her affair with Jimmy). Assuming that her relationship with Edward and her marriage to John are over, Florence takes prussic acid—which she has carried for years in a vial that John thought held her heart medicine—and dies.

Edward's last affair is his most scandalous as he becomes infatuated with Nancy. Nancy came to live with the Ashburnhams after leaving a convent where her parents had sent her; her mother was a violent alcoholic and her father (it is later suggested that this man may not be Nancy's biological father) may have abused her. Edward, tearing himself apart because he does not want to spoil Nancy's innocence, arranges to have her sent to India to live with her father, even though this frightens her terribly. Once Leonora knows that Edward intends to keep his passion for Nancy chaste, only wanting Nancy to continue to love him from afar, she torments him by making this wish impossible. She pretends to offer to divorce him so he can marry Nancy but informs Nancy of his sordid sexual history, destroying Nancy's innocent love for him. After Nancy's departure, Edward receives a telegram from her that reads, "Safe Brindisi. Having a rattling good time. Nancy." He asks Dowell to take the telegram to his wife, pulls out his pen knife, says that it's time he had some rest and slits his own throat. When Nancy reaches Aden and sees the obituary in the paper, she becomes catatonic.

The novel's last section has Dowell writing from Edward's old estate in England where he takes care of Nancy whom he cannot marry because of her mental illness. Nancy is only capable of repeating two things—a Latin phrase meaning "I believe in an omnipotent God" and the word "shuttlecocks." Dowell states that the story is sad because no one got what they wanted. Leonora wanted Edward but lost him and ended in marrying the normal (but dull) Rodney Bayham. Edward wanted Nancy but gave her up then lost her. Dowell wanted a wife but ended up a nurse to two women.

Dowell ends up generally unsure about where to lay the blame, but expressing sympathy for Edward because he believes himself similar to Edward in nature. The fact is he has been disengaged, a voyeur. While the other characters are flawed, he has never participated in life. He is revealed as less than the foolish innocent he represents himself as, when he walks away, leaving Edward to slit his throat with a very small pen knife.