Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/2

 his companion, if he has one) with various elements of a complex and often corrupt society. Frequently, the main character remains on the move throughout, so the story consists of the series of episodes he experiences on the road, the various adventures he must survive or obstacles he must overcome to keep going. And the story ends when the hero finishes his journeying (at least for the moment).

Sometimes a key element in creating and sustaining interest in the sequence of incidents is the development of this main character, the sense that the journey is educating him in some way, especially about his relationship to society (as, for example, in Gulliver’s Travels or Huckleberry Finn). Where that occurs, often the main point of the work is the nature of that development, the extent to which his experiences have changed or failed to change the hero in significant ways (we shall consider later whether that is the case with Hašek’s hero).

The picaresque novel is a genre well suited to satire because it enables the author, with a minimum of effort, to introduce a wide variety of social types in different and often incongruously funny situations in order to expose their hypocrisy, vanity, and stupidity. The form makes no complex demands for intricate plotting (as, for example, in a detective story) or, in many cases, detailed characterization (most of the characters are caricatures of social types). And the journey can (as in Hašek’s novel) be temporarily halted and resumed again without a loss of narrative energy or logic.

What the style does demand, of course, is a sympathetic and interesting central character, a great deal of narrative inventiveness in the variety of episodes, and effectively witty satire to sustain the reader’s interest in the journey from one episode to the next. Few things are more tedious in literature than a picaresque novel which has run out of steam and is becoming repetitive or has lost its satiric bite.

A frequent additional feature of a number of picaresque novels is the presence of a narrator who guides us through the adventures and typically delivers his own views on particular issues which the adventures of the hero are exploring or illustrating. In other forms of storytelling such repeated intrusions into the world of the represented fiction