Among the strangest, if not the "saddest," novels of the 20th century

I don’t know that The Good Soldier (1915) is the “saddest story,” as Ford Madox Ford has his narrator (whose name we don’t even learn until the last page!) opine at the outset, but it’s among the strangest stories and maybe the best example in 20^th-century literature of a “naïve narrator,” that is, a work in which we the reader know or understand much more than the narrator does himself. Ostensibly, this is a story centered on 4 people – the narrator, his wife (Florence), and couple whom they befriend (Capt. Edward and, his wife, Leonora Ashburnham. Throughout, the narrator praises the other 3, the Captain (the “good soldier” of the title) in particular for his manners, bearing, and taste. Over the course of the novel, Edward betrays his wife through a # of extended affairs with married women of their acquaintance, in particular a decade-long affair with the narrator’s wife, Florence, which he never suspects until its tragic demise (her suicide by poison). In fact, she’d been unfaithful to him from the start, and their long marriage seems to have been without sex and definitely without affection. The story ends in suicide and madness for each of the main characters, except for the narrator – with the final blow occurring when the young woman whom Edward and Leonora had been raising as a niece is packed off t Ceylon after Edward makes clumsy passes at and proposals to her – and she loses her mind. What makes this otherwise melodramatic and over-the-top novel so strange and unsettling is the narrator’s complete acceptance of all of the illicit love affairs and betrayals, some of which border of child abuse – but all seem, to him, OK and even tragic because Edward was such a good sort, mannered, cultured, educated, generous to a fault; the narrator never sees or recognizes Edward’s (and Florence’s) cruelty and infidelity – it’s all OK because his they are all so well-mannered. Looking at the novel as a whole, while the characters are despicable and narrator is naïve and perhaps unreliable, we see that none of the foursome really had a chance; they married too young, with any experience of love or sex, with little or no affection, just giving in to the social expectations of the day; the narrator himself, for example, “eloped” with Florence, climbing to her bedroom via a rope ladder: What a cliché! – yet that’s part of the point, the characters are all bound by the clichés they’ve read of or heard of (their lives destroyed by “bad fiction,” much like Emma Bovary’s).