I’ll grant you that THE GOOD SOLDIER, by Ford Madox Ford, has one of the great first lines in all of literature (“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”). Alas, this isn’t a sad tale at all, but it does have the sorriest narrator I’ve ever encountered in a book, much less a celebrated classic such as this one. John Dowell is weak, cuckolded, and pathetic. While celebrated for being an excellent example of an “unreliable narrator,” I just found him to be whiny and irritating.