It is set just before World War I, and chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham and his seemingly perfect marriage, along with that of his two American friends.

Ford employs the device of the unreliable narrator[1] to great effect, as the main character gradually reveals a version of events that is quite different from what the introduction leads the reader to believe.

"[5] 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".

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.

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, 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.

He asks Dowell to take the telegram to his wife, pulls out his pen knife, says that it is time he had some rest and slits his own throat.

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.

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.

Thus, behind the more or less explicit narrative lurks a possible counter-narrative in which Dowell is something of a sociopath, caring for no one but himself, an observer of others who are living more fully while never actively engaging very intensely in life himself, and indeed, perhaps a voyeur relishing the demise of others.

Ashburnham is an Anglican by birth who wants to build a Catholic chapel on his property for Leonora and who would have converted to Catholicism had he been spurred to it by his wife, who remains indifferent.

Dowell's disillusionment follows the arc of modernism; he begins with presuppositions typical of much Victorian characterization: the individual conditioned by circumstance, composed of intelligible motives, susceptible to moral analysis-the justified self.

[7] The novel was adapted as a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime by Lu Kemp in 2008, read by Toby Stephens and produced by Kirsty Williams.