• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.127-157
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• 2014

Among many literary isms, impressionism is often regarded as the most frank expression of personality. As a masterpiece of modernism, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a celebration of the subjectivity which reflects the writer's experiential reality. For Madox Ford, art is not to achieve the true objectivity of human society, but to seize the momentary perception in personal life. As the beginning of modernism, Madox Ford's impressionaism was mostly devoted to give fictive life to subjective impressions. And his heroes are usually the egoless person who can absorb the intense rapidity of consciousness without any prejudice. However, the innocent mind's receptions of myriad impressions, like those of the protagonist John Dowell or his idealized version of Major Ashburnham in The Good Solidier, were described as the enjoyable yet deceptive ones in Madox Ford's works. To engrave more sold perceptive impressions into life, Madox Ford often contrasts or mixes truth with deception, life with death as he did in his real life. Speicially as the result of thick application of real-life subject matters to his writings, Madox Ford's literary works get more vivid colors and penetrating forms. Thus, his literary impressionism based upon his harsh and passionate realities overcomes the limitations of shifting moments of senses, demolishing the boundaries between what is objective and what is subjective, like post-impressionism or expressionism. Namely, as Walter Lowenfels said, Madox Ford did not follow the impossible objectivity passively, yet instead "knew how to invent the truth."