Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/18

 or his surroundings (growing more aware of particular problems or developing a sharper critical faculty or developing new strategies for coping or even reflecting very much about what’s going on in his life). In fact, Švejk’s inner life, how he really feels about his experiences or what he is learning about himself or others or his real opinions of the bigger picture, is largely irrelevant. In the same way we learn very little of his past, so little, in fact, that when we do get a clear detail very late in the novel, the post card written to him by an old girl friend (who wrote the note, interestingly enough, while sitting in the outhouse), the information comes as rather a surprise.

The closest Švejk comes to offering something like a “philosophy of life” is the following remark:

But there’s little indication that this amounts to anything more than a casual remark in a particular conversation, and certainly that notion of keeping one’s mouth shut is hardly characteristic of the man (unless he means that one should never proclaim one’s innocence or complain about injustice). The sense of resentment conveyed by the comparison with Jesus Christ hardly squares with the character who, for the most part, cheerfully accepts whatever situation he is thrown into. So the idea that Švejk has something as coherent as a “philosophy of life” which he brings to each adventure is elusive and ambiguous.

That very ambiguity, in fact, may well be an important ingredient in the character’s fame. Rather than being a sharply delineated, particular character, Švejk is an Everyman, a composite of very ordinary characteristics, bringing to each situation a range of responses from shrewdness to stupidity (real and apparent), from enthusiastic compliance to genial indifference. The sum total of his attributes may not add up to a harmonious and convincing whole—a coherent and particular individual