Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/4

 Galicia a faded Austrian soldier’s cap with a rusty Imperial badge would flutter over it in wind and rain. From time to time a miserable old carrion crow would perch on it, recalling fat feasts of bygone days when there used to be spread for him an unending table of human corpses and horse carcasses, when just under the cap on which he perched there lay the daintiest morsels of all—human eyes.(230)

Throughout the novel the continual presence of the narrator consistently injects a grim and unrelenting irony, as he does in the above passage, particularly against the hypocrisy of the church, the stupidity of the army and the police, and the destructiveness of war (these contributions get more frequent the closer the story moves toward the front lines).

Thus, the comedy of Švejk’s adventures is played out against a backdrop of sharp and often bitter narrative commentary, a presence which is always reminding us that, however fanciful some episodes may be and however much we may chuckle at a particular incident, the actions arise out of a real experience. There’s a black edge to the humour here, and we are not allowed to forget that the genesis of this classic of modern humour involves a fierce anger or, more appropriately perhaps, a “savage indignation” (the phrase associated with Jonathan Swift) against the absurd cruelty human beings typically inflict on each other when they forget their common humanity and delude themselves with dreams of greatness and pride.

This feature of Hašek’s style creates a curious tension in places between the harsh tone of the narrator and the more amusingly ironic presence of Švejk, as if we are witnessing an often implausibly funny comedy in front of an ominously real and graphic backdrop of atrocity. As I shall be discussing later, this tension qualifies the comedy in some complex ways and encourages us to respond to it not necessarily as the affirmation of a healthy alternative vision of life but as something potentially more absurd, much darker than conventional comic satire might suggest. It also prevents us from sentimentalizing Švejk, for we are constantly reminded that the situations he has to deal with, the routine cruelties and abuse he has to confront, are not