Because Švejk complies so enthusiastically with the system (even when he’s imprisoned or committed into an asylum) and candidly confesses to everything he’s done, showing no trace of guile or hostility, he constantly frustrates the bureaucrats who have to deal with him. Again and again, they simply don’t know what to do about him. The bureaucracy, of course, deals with people by categorizing them. Švejk has been certified as an idiot (20), but he doesn’t seem to fit that category, so he must be “traitor” or a “malingerer.” But no one is more openly keen about participating in the army than Švejk, a response which the officials find incomprehensible (since they characteristically adopt the attitude that the ordinary people they are supposed to serve are all liars, cheats, or hostile to their efforts). So the bureaucracy is always interrogating Švejk, trying to determine how to classify him. But interrogating Švejk simply leads to confusion because he agrees with everything the interrogator says and willingly signs his confession without even reading it. So that means he must be a “lunatic” beyond medical help or an extremely effective and clever spy. The police try probing him—accusing him of being “ironic” in his patriotic enthusiasm (45)—but that label simply does not hold up because Švejk maintains such a totally innocent appearance and such unambiguously candid enthusiasm for the Emperor that no one can conceive of his harbouring a secret agenda (and we get little sense that that is the case).
This habit of overeager enthusiastic compliance with the system, as Joseph Skvorecky points out, is the crucial part of Švejk’s character, and it serves to highlight “the absurdity of ideological orthodoxy” (42). To display the sort of physical and verbal cooperation Švejk routinely displays and to bring about the usually counterproductive results such a response generates (from the point of view of the bureaucrats) repeatedly reminds us of the insanity at the heart of the entire bureaucratic structure. This may even be something the bureaucrats themselves sense. Their constant baffled frustration and impotence when confronted with Švejk suggest that they, too, sense how impossible such a response is to the world they serve. They can’t process him because they can only deal with normal human beings, who are inherently hostile or indifferent to the larger system (a response which is natural enough, given that the system, as
