The Good Soldier may best be grappled with if viewed in painterly terms, and specifically from the Impressionist painting standpoint. The narrator is avowedly--and as he reveals on the train journey to the Luther Schloss--one who absorbs the world through impressions, that is, if given the choice. The fact is that he is married to one whose self-identified life-role is to 'shed some light' on the unenlightened. But the light Florence sheds is bookish, learned, not immediate, in contrast with Dowell's preferred absorption of the immediate--the Impressionist 'catching the moment' . The result is that, until Florence's death, Dowell's vision of reality is prescribed, indeed circumscribed, by the artificial, studio-style contours that Florence conveys and depicts.
It is only after Florence's death that Dowell is liberated--just as he felt liberated on the train journey and open to a welter of natural impressions--and is open to a plethora of different sources of light, which illuminate subtle differences in what was for Dowell heretofore a definite, contoured world : the world of artificial, surface impression. With the arrival of these different sources of light from Edward, Nancy and Leonora, Dowell's former 'studio-vision' of the world becomes, as in Impressionist painting, a dazzle of irridescent light, and the solid blocks, the definite contours he knew become indistinct--to the extent that Dowell with increasing light shed becomes continually less sure of where exactly the truth lies, of where to fix the contours.
In the same fashion as how in an Impressionist painting the subjects not only lose contour but become indistinguishable, so within Dowell's account of Edward's relationships with Maisie and Florence, the one character merges with the other. Equally in his own sphere : Nancy becomes a Leonora Mark-2. And, further, the hinted-at illegitimacy and/or potential madness of Florence becomes indistinguishable from Nancy's assumed illegitimacy and budding madness--an apt convergence in that both are candidates for wife to Dowell, i.e., Mark 1 and 2 .
As the Impressionist often painted the same setting with at times the same human as part of that setting--e.g. Claude Monet, with his wife as subject materiel, producing a variety of versions, depending on the available play and variety of light, of the same scenario--so in The Good Soldier we have the static scenario of the 4-member coterie, the successive renditions of which are entirely dependent on the amount of light shed on them. Indeed, the novel in total is an occasion for Dowell to re-experience what he has experienced and portrayed on different occasions before, but his comprehensive version is no more conclusive than his versions from within the coterie .
