Don't get caught up in a reading that doesn't get beyond the most shallow interpretation of events and phrasing. This apparently casually written work is a masterpiece of finely thought out detail. While deconstruction can be pointless, taking irony at face value is just as futile.
It seems like a book about Leonora and Edward Ashburnham as told by a naive and passive friend, John Dowell. In reality, it is the transformation of John Dowell as he makes sense of his world after shattering information. His entire sense of reality has been undermined by the knowledge that the past 13 years 6 months were established in lies.
The structure of the novel is deceptively simple. His retelling of past events masks the fact that the action of telling the story occurs in the present. Dowell tells us he has been writing for 6 months, he goes away for 18 months, returns, and then finishes the last two chapters. The lack of a fixed time frame for the narrated histories of the major characters again blurs time. And then there is the fact that there are several layers of story. There is reality, which we can never know. There is what Dowell believed was reality, of which he gives some description. There are the stories from various points of view that Dowell was told and then digests and retells to us. Then there is the present action of Dowell's changing self. All of these except for the last, are filtered through Dowell's narration. The last is exposed through his narration. In this work we have one of the finest examples of the Impressionist style of writing, as well as the Modern.
Dowell is a recovering innocent. His identification with Edward is not absurd or insane, but the yearning of an innocent and a romantic for a perceived ideal that has been destroyed by a world that cannot nourish or understand it.
Of course, this is a simplistic and narrow description that doesn't even get into the pre-WWI aspect of the novel and the August 4 controversy. Suffice it to say that the book is incredibly rich and there are no wasted words. Read it, it is worth it.
