Svejk is a complex character. Although he has been discharged from military service for idiocy, as he goes about telling everyone, he is far from being a fool. He is quite capable of making himself appear as a fool to save a situation and he owed his discharge from the army to this resourcefulness. Svejk speaks most of the time in double-talk. He pretends to be in agreement with any one he is dealing with, particularly if he happens to be his superior officer. But the irony behind his remarks is always perceptive. Not only are his explanations and observations ironical, but so too are his actions.

For instance, his apparent efforts to get to the front by protesting his patriotism and devotion to the monarchy, when it is clear that his action would only impede the achievement of his proclaimed objective.

Svejk is no fool. His brother is a schoolmaster and he is clearly an educated man. He expresses himself in the language of the street-smart but concealed is a rich literary vocabulary combined with an encyclopaedic knowledge that he imbibed through extensive reading of newspapers and journals. He has learned human psychology through close observation and his deductions are original and penetrating.

In dealing with his bosses, he masks his real views and, in dealing with his own class, he rarely reveals his own ideas. At the end of Part 1, "Behind the Lines", he says exactly what he thinks of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy: "A monarchy as stupid as this ought not to exist." Very simply, Svejk teaches us a simple lesson in diplomacy: there is a time and place to say something.

Behind the bland exterior, Svejk accepts with equanimity all the struggles and privations of army life. Although he does not have a high opinion of most of his superiors, he is capable of personal devotion to the officer to whom he is seconded, in this case Lieutenant Lukas. Also, entrusted with a responsibility, he discharges it to the best of his ability, often with a degree of ruthlessness. Svejk grows in stature when he proves his superiority to those around him. He has a disarming way of attracting the admiration of stupid generals and colonels because he has "a way about him".

Much of the ugliness and futility of war and of the bungling bureaucracy is reflected in the absurd situations in which Svejk lands himself in: at the police headquarters, with medical experts, in the lunatic asylum, in jail or in the meaningless chores he is asked to do, behind the lines or at the front. Svejk knows that what he has been asked to do was absurd but it would be futile to protest against an armed bureaucracy. So he acquiesces and carries on. And these absurdities are highlighted through the language of the common soldier: crude and down-to- earth with no attempt at sophistication. This is how it actually is in the whirl and muddle of war and which is why The Good Soldier is considered a classic anti-war novel - perhaps more than Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. The coarseness and nastiness of language is also a deliberate ploy to shake the bureaucracy out of its stupor of complacency and hypocrisy where nothing seems to make them move or matter.

In a larger sense, The Good Soldier is the story of the universal "little man" caught up in the coils of officialdom and bureaucracy and who does not know the way out of the forest of rules and regulations or why they were there in the first place. In many ways, Hasek anticipates Kafka's The Trial where "someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."

In fact, Max Brod who had diagonised the genius of Kafka, described Hasek as " a humourist of the highest calibre."

But it is a laughter that goes straight into the heart of things - which could also be very sad at times.

RAVI VYAS