Crushed by convention

Ford's moral, if it is his and not only Dowell's, is trite.

Convention denies people what they want and so they are broken and miserable.

But it is not convention that ruins these people but the incompatibility of their desires and their flawed characters.

If Ford's story is a tragedy at all it is quite an old-fashioned one, so far as that goes.

Early on and more than once, later, he shows us that the happiness of his characters depends, again in classic style, on ignorance of their true relations, often deliberately maintained by those closest to them through plain deception.

Sophocles is not far off.

Reading The Good Soldier.