by Jaroslav Hašek.
The point has not gone wholly unnoticed. Emmanuel Frynta, in a pictorial biography of Hašek, sees in Švejk the archetype of the wise fool, and mentions the Spanish picaro, along with several other figures, as literary ancestors.1
Radko Pytlík cites picaros such as Lazarillo de Tonnes, Simplicius, and Gil Bias as literary prototypes for Švejk.2
S. Streller, in a recent article comparing Hašek's novel with Brecht's Schweyk im weiten Weltkrieg, calls Švejk "ein Typus, der in die unmit-telbare Nähe des spanischen picaro ... gehört."3
Among critical works on the picaresque novel, only one (to my knowledge) even mentions Hašek's novel: Pikaro heute by Wilfried van der Will.4
Van der Will's discussion contains some interesting insights, but the two pages he devotes to Švejk contain essentially a description of Švejk as a type of picaro, with no real look at the work as a whole. The only critic to refer to Švejk as a picaresque novel is J. P. Stem, but by this he seems to mean only that it is "constructed on the pattern of 'one damn thing after another.'"5
Finally, Cecil Parrott, in his recent critical study of Hašek's works (the first in English), briefly considers the picaresque novel as a possible classification for Švejk; he notes the similarities, but then seems to reject the categorization.6
Clearly, then, a systematic examination of the work as a picaresque novel has yet to be made, and that is what will be attempted here.
What do we mean when we call a novel written in this century "picaresque"? It would seem arbitrary to restrict the designation to works which are conscious imitations of any of the "classic" examples of the genre, from Lazarillo de Tormes to Smollet's Roderick Random. Rather, we may consider any work as picaresque which conforms generally to the norms established in these earlier works, and which shares
