Ford Madox Ford

The past year I have been confused. I have been so confused to the point where it has made me sick. I have been making myself; me, myself and I sick. I have been lost. There are so many things that I haven’t been able to understand, and because of that I have been sick. My sickness has been depression and anxiety. I am not a depressed person. I am a happy person. I love life and I love people. I appreciate the small things and enjoy seeing the good within the world. The past six months I fell in a black hole because the person I loved didn’t love me back and took me for granted, manipulated me, messed with my mind, made me think these things that were happening right in front of my eyes were simply psychological—this has never happened before. I was betrayed. I was blinded by the fact that I wanted the love between us to be real so badly that I denied the toxicity this person was injecting me with. I have been so angry with myself for being depressed and anxious because of it. My anxiety escalated to a point where I only felt safe in my own bed. I couldn’t even go into the subway or the grocery store, let alone school, without feeling like I couldn’t breathe and that I was taking my last few breathes before my deathbed. I didn’t understand how one person could make me feel so much. I was so angry with myself for being this way. I had no idea who I was anymore—what I liked, who I liked, what I wanted to do with my life, for I had been living through another’s life the past year.

            In the second chapter of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, he describes the relationship and betrayal of a husband, wife and her lover. Ford writes in a way that is straightforward but also hidden. I interpret his literary style in this excerpt as a display of the psychological character of the husband. I can relate to this technique because I too was straightforward but hidden with myself emotionally. I see this as denial, therefore producing the unreliable narrator.

I cannot speak for The Good Soldier as a symbolic extension of Paris, however for myself, I see my personal situation as such. For the past six months I have been punishing myself for being the way I was—I felt stupid. Like “The Lost Generation” I came to Paris looking for answers, and in such a short amount of time being here, the past two months I have found some. This is how I view one representation of Paris—a place to go when one is stuck and looking for a way out. Bliss has found me again. I am a person who can feel. And isn’t that better than not being able to feel at all even if it is darkness? I have been so upset because sometimes I feel as if my kindness only backfires. Maybe it does at times, but that is just life. I know for a fact that kindness in the end is always appreciated and taken in, whether it goes the way that can be seen clearly or not. There is something special about the air and energy in Paris; it can open the eyes of those whose have been shut for a long time. When those eyes are opened, the inspiration and feeling that has been lost appears within and out of the soul effortlessly.