Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/17

 they come to symbolize something about the life of a people (or people in general).

It’s possible to spend a great deal of time unnecessarily worrying about Švejk as a particular character. Is he an idiot or only pretending to be an idiot? Is he an educated man or not? Has he a deliberately contrived scheme for thwarting the military bureaucracy or is he really a credulous and enthusiastic supporter of authority? Is he merely lucky or an expert manipulator of situations? And so on. These questions legitimately arise from the novel, since the portrayal of Švejk alters our perception of him from one incident to the next, and, if we wish to form a coherent picture of a complex and consistent character, we may well have some difficulty deciding (as we do with Falstaff as well, of course, and many other great fictional characters). How can we reconcile someone who, on his own, seems to be incapable of walking a few kilometres without getting lost or caring about getting lost, even on a road he’s already travelled (as in Part II) with the apparently much shrewder and decisive man in certain adventures in Part I and later?

The narrator doesn’t give us much help here, since we are very rarely offered a glimpse into what’s going on in Švejk’s head. We hear what he says and see what he does, but the motives are rarely clear. Early on, we get some sense that he is a simpleton—as, for example, in his patriotic outbursts on the way to the recruiting station in a wheelchair or in the narrator’s comments like the following: “His simple face, smiling like a full moon, beamed with enthusiasm. Everything was so clear to him” (13). However, at times the narrator suggests there’s a hint of some strategy at work behind the apparent artlessness of his answers: “‘Humbly report, sir,’ said Švejk deliberately, staking everything on a single card’” (88, italics added). The novel even calls attention to this apparent discrepancy:

Unlike other heroes of similar novels (e.g., Huckleberry Finn or Gulliver) there is no sense that Švejk is learning anything as he goes or is developing a new understanding of himself