The development of a triangular relationship among Nancy, Edward, and Leonora, which the death of Florence helps create, mirrors much of what Dowell has been struggling with, which is a serious and unrequited love to Florence. While on one hand, Florence is struggling to find love, so is Dowell only that is more sincere. As Ford reaches the midpoint of the novel with the death of Florence, he is faced with the problem of shifting the focus of events form Florence, who has played a big role in part one and two, to Nancy, who has barely been mentioned in the novel at this point. In Dowell s mind, Ford has been anticipation this moment since he first alluded to Nancy and Edward and their tragic situation in the beginning of the first chapter. Dowell has also been foreshadowing of many events to come but would not go into great detail about events surrounding his feelings. It can be determined that Ford s rearrangement of chronology has been to achieve a unity of circumstances and events by this point. In the beginning Ford surrounds us with the death of Florence with a swift and fast pasted moving of events. This gives the reader little chance to render any opinions about the matter and rather we can only believe what Dowell tells us. Ford deliberately arranges this circumstance because he can later bring Florence s supposed accidental death to take a turn in the mind of Dowell, who continues to believe that Florence s death was because of a heart attack many months later.
In the second half of the novel, Dowell in the final pages is not made so believable as he could be. Dowell was present at very few events and we don t have his eyewitness accounts to physical action as we saw in the firs half of the novel. Thus, Dowell can only present accounts of other characters in sometimes their own words and sometimes in his own. He often uses both participants to give insight to a scene.
Ford s sense of time, reflected in his constant use of the time-shift, is artistic rather than of philosophical concern. He is concerned, as in a sense all writers are, with the transience of man s life, with the structure of values man erects in his hope of warding of change. The structure of The Good Soldier would seem to support the point that Ford seems to be saying that life is a long series of connection mirrors, being never able to see the image behind us and never seeing the image of the next frame. No event is the same twice; even our memory of an event is different each time. And yet the continuity of human experience is precisely that is does repeat itself. Thus, the whole pattern of the novel has been the preparation for a final love affair.
By creating a narrative that presents the inner mind of one man, Ford Madox Ford is able to intermix many different themes and ideas about the different ways people interact with each other. Ford creates Dowell as a simple yet highly complicated individual who is able to show the many different workings of the human mind. By so doing, he is able to present a story that not only talks about the problem of human relationships, but also he is able to draw the listener-reader in, to construct their own understanding of Dowell s story narrative.