Dialectics and Passive Resistance: The Comic Antihero in Modern Fiction (Comparative Literature, Vol 38)

A unique literary type emerges in twentieth century fiction which finds its most characteristic prototype in Jaroslav Hasek’s The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk (1923). The prototypical model of Schwejk, unlike such socially alienated types as Existential Man, signals the beginnings of a passive resistance to the alienating threat of oppression and destruction through a skillful mastery of dialectical humor, a strategy which is traced comparatively through variations of the Schwejk prototype in the fiction of other contemporary national literatures.