Page:On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.pdf/5

 merely exaggerated fictions, caricatures of real life (although they frequently are that as well).

THE SATIRIC TARGET

And what specifically is the target of Hašek’s indignation? A common observation in answer to this question is that this is a great anti-war novel, written in response to the absurd situations the author himself experienced during World War I. That war is obviously an essential element in the novel, since virtually every character in the book is associated with the war in some way and almost all the action takes place within the context of a military unit.

And yet in some ways this novel is obviously about a good deal more than war. After all, while there are a great many caustic comments and satirical moments when the inhumanity of modern military life is exposed for the idiotic folly it is, there are no combat scenes in the novel, and we are never given a detailed and sustained glimpse of soldiers killing and being killed. There is very little attention paid to weapons or training or conduct which is unique to military experience. In addition, a great deal of the satire of what goes on in the army has little to do with its existence of the army per se and is much more focused on the military as an organization with a complex chain of command, complicated procedures, and a system of authority, whose major function, it seems, is to order people around in ways they never fully understand (perhaps because they are beyond anyone’s comprehension).

Hence, we would be closer to the heart of the novel, I think, to claim that the real target here is the army as a structured bureaucracy designed to organize human effort, and, beyond that, of all forms of social bureaucracy claiming authority over the common folk in the name of some greater good—religious, imperial, judicial, or whatever. The Good Soldier Švejk, in fact, is a truly great satire (perhaps the greatest of them all) on the most central feature of social life in the past century and a half (at least) in most modern industrialized countries—the ubiquitous presence of huge, labyrinthine bureaucratic structures ostensibly set in place to make modern society more efficient, equal, and fair, but, in fact, reducing life for those who have to deal with them to what often amounts to an incomprehensible and out-of-