Karel Čapek: An Ordinary Life (1968)

The noetic trilogy Hordubal - Povětroň - Ordinary Life by the novelist, journalist, playwright, essayist, translator and critic Karel Čapek (1890-1938) is undoubtedly one of the artistic highlights of the author's oeuvre. The third part of the trilogy, the novel Ordinary Life, was published in 1934 and is one of Čapek's fundamental noetic prose works, in which the author questions the nature of truth and the possibilities of its knowledge. The hero of the novel is an average railway clerk who, at the end of his life, tries to describe the course of his "ordinary" life. When he denounces it, he begins to have an increasingly heated argument with his own gaze about who he really was, what kind of life he really lived. Gradually, he finds within himself the seemingly overlooked motives for his actions, a kind of hidden person who seems to stand out from the framework of ordinary life. Every human life, even the most seemingly ordinary, is in fact rich and complex; we all live only one of our possibilities. But even the unrealised possibilities help us to understand other people and their life stories.