Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/19

 identity—but it symbolizes the resources ordinary human beings bring to what is, in effect, repeated confrontations with something cruel, oppressive, and absurd. Perhaps that’s why he’s acquired legendary status.

It’s important to notice that Švejk spends almost the entire novel carrying out orders or being told what to do by people who have official authority to compel and to punish. If they want to sell him to someone else in a game of cards, there’s nothing he can do about it. He has no real freedom to make decisions about any of the most important issues of his life. In fact, apart from the opening scenes, he has no life of his own: he has to participate in the life other people have determined for him. There are some options within that life, of course (especially the option about how to respond to compulsion), but the basic conditions are set. He has no private sphere of operation, no home, and no set of intimate relationships he is trying to protect or get back to or even think about. Hence, his entire life, as the novel depicts it, is determined by others, by his superiors, by the system.

Even Švejk’s social identity, like that of other working-class people in the novel, is determined by the bureaucracy. He is some official’s batman or a regimental orderly, without the freedom to choose. His function is to accept the label pinned on him by others, to obey orders without question, to carry out duties for other people, and to go where they tell him. That is a fate he shares with all other lower ranks in the book. The only real freedom he experiences as an observer of people making choices about who they are or want to be occurs, ironically enough, in the lunatic asylum:

And, of course, why not? In a world ruled by an absurd bureaucracy in control of everyone, those who insist on the