Narrative strategies in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and The Good Soldier

Abstract

In opposition to theories which gave the author pride of place as the creator of literary works embodying definite meanings, the French thinker Roland Barthes maintained that it was the reader, and not the author, who attached meanings to a text. According to Barthes, the major factor which enabled readers to interpret works of fiction, or to render them "intelligible," was their narrative structure. Following Barthes, the French critic Gérard Genette developed a comprehensive theory of narratives. In the light of Barthes’s views and Genette’s theory, this dissertation will analyse the English novelist Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End and The Good Soldier. Both works have narrators who undergo a process of identification with a major character. Through an analysis of the narrative strategies employed by the narrators, the dissertation aims to discuss the implications of this process in the interpretation of these works.