Simundich, Joel.

In Ford Madox Ford's 1915 novel The Good Soldier, John Dowell comments "I had never sounded the depths of an English heart," as he painstakingly reconstructs his "extreme intimacy" with his late wife and their two closest friends. Throughout his narrative, Dowell approaches the limits of language, struggling to connect with lost companions by bringing language into scenes of miscommunication and silence. By translating emotional impasses and wordless exchanges from memory into narrative, Dowell seems to make these wordless interactions wordful. Ludwig Wittgenstein's investigation into "private language" helps elucidate Dowell's realization that he cannot fill wordlessness with words to reconstruct his memories. If Dowell can't fill wordlessness with words, his failure to "sound the depths of an English heart" isn't a failure at all, but rather an exposition on "private language" as public language, demonstrating that misunderstandings can be our best attempts at understanding each other.