The implied reader in ford madox ford’s the good soldier and John Banville’s Newton letter: a comparative reading
The implied reader in ford madox ford’s the good soldier and John Banville’s Newton letter: a comparative reading

Summary/Abstract: Wolfgang Iser in “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” creates a link between the reader and the text and hence an aesthetic bond between the process of reading and the material at hand. Accordingly when the reader accepts the connection between the sentences in a text, he causes them to interact and Iser also believes that non-traditional texts are abundant with gaps which are there to be filled in by the readers’ interpretations. Within this framework Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and John Banville’s The Newton Letter (1982), despite years of gap in between, leave quite a wide margin for various interpretations especially in relation to the use of the first person narrator and its problematic status which is an outcome of the impressionistically recounted stories of the narrators. This study shows that there is a close link between The Good Soldier and The Newton Letter in the manner they lead their readers into both fabricating and solving out the mystery and ambiguity created by the impressionistically knit narratives. This study foregrounds this discovery and reconsiders The Good Soldier and The Newton Letter as similar texts both drawing from the same work, Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften, translated as Elective Affinities in English.

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