The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being: Characters

Each character's approach to life is influenced by their mindset. While some embrace lightness, others see themselves as shackled by heaviness. Kundera uses each of the main characters to explore the contrast between the two approaches.

Tomáš

A surgeon and an intellectual, Tomáš continually cheats on his wife. He justifies these affairs as an inescapable part of his natural behavior and a quest for deeper understanding. While he sees this as lightness, it becomes a crushing burden. Because Tomáš wants to be free of any political ideology or belief system, he refuses offers from the communist regime and the underground movement. He pays heavily for this, losing his job and life in Prague. However, when he moves to the country and becomes a window washer, he finds a lightness that helps him to remain loyal to Tereza.

Tereza

Tereza desperately wants to attach meaning and weight to everything in her life. She even views Tomáš's affairs as a weight she must carry. Her approach to life stems from childhood trauma. Tereza's promiscuous mother would often walk around the house naked and publicly boasted about her sex life. She believed there should be no shame attached to nudity or the human body and denied Tereza any basic sense of privacy, even going so far as to have the bathroom door removed.

This lack of privacy forced Tereza to escape into the world of literature and art. In order to cope with this strange upbringing, Tereza viewed her body and soul as separate entities. While her body is light and meaningless, her soul is heavily weighed by the need to find meaning. Tereza attempts to find lightness by sleeping with a stranger but ultimately finds it unbearable.

Sabina

Sabina's lightness is expressed by her refusal to conform to social expectations. Unlike Tereza, she attaches little meaning to ideas of fidelity and commitment and is sexually open. As Tomáš's mistress, she sees their relationship as solely physical and does not want to be burdened with ideas of love. This lightness allows Sabina to detach from people and places easily. It also leaves her lonely and isolated at the end of the novel.

Franz

Franz is a bookish professor in Geneva who sees Sabina's lightness as an escape from his loveless marriage. After falling madly in love and being rejected by Sabina, Franz continues to search for meaning. He sees himself as part of humanity's march towards progress. He becomes involved in a political movement to create responsibility. Idealistic about love and politics, Franz is often easily influenced by others.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being: Analysis

Kundera uses the lives of Tomáš, Tereza, Sabina, and Franz to explore the contrasting approaches to living. He employs the dichotomy of heaviness and lightness to examine the human condition.

Lightness and Weight

Kundera uses the contrast between lightness and weights to explore different approaches to living and the repercussions of these viewpoints. The heaviness sees life's events as predetermined and inescapable. Following the idea of eternal return, all of life's actions are given a great weight of responsibility and importance. Throughout the novel, characters are shown to struggle with this weight. Tereza is continually desperate to find meaning and tries to do so by attaching significant importance to her marriage.

In the novel, Kundera represents both responsibility and freedom from responsibility as burdensome. Pixabay

In contrast to this heaviness, the light approach sees life as something that only happens once. Because life is so fleeting, humans are freed from the grave importance of eternal return. Therefore people should reject the idea that there is one true path to find and focus instead on enjoying life. Sabina is the embodiment of this approach. She rejects relationships and limitations and prides herself on being independent.

Free from commitment to people or even her home nation, she can express herself in her art and sexuality. Sabina enjoys the lightness of life that other characters desperately want. For example, both Tomáš and Franz use affairs as attempts to live a lighter, carefree life.

However, this lightness comes at a cost. Tomáš's womanizing becomes an addiction and threatens his happiness with Tereza. Franz frees himself from the heavy burden of an unhappy marriage but eventually wants to find weight and meaning. When Franz attempts to find this through political activism, he ends up paralyzed and trapped in his body. Even Sabina, the embodiment of light, ends the novel alone, imagining a life in a stable relationship and with a family. Ultimately, Kundera shows that the pursuit of lightness and the freedom the characters enjoy in the light eventually becomes unbearable.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being: Genre

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is a blend of several different genres. It is a philosophical novel that uses the characters to explore more significant concepts about how to live life.

As well as Nietchze's concept of eternal return, Parmenides' idea of lightness forms an important underpinning for the novel's central message. The contrast between the two is explored throughout the book as the narrator interrupts the action to provide his analysis of how the character's actions reflect the philosophical ideas. By using the elements of philosophical fiction, Kundera can convey his thoughts on the human condition.

Though it is never explicitly stated, the narrator is assumed to be Kundera himself. While most third-person narratives unfold in a detached manner, Kundera often uses narration to analyze his writing and illustrate the novel's deeper themes. He openly admits in the narration that the characters and events of the story are fictional but uses them to provide commentary on his views of life.

By acknowledging the fiction of the work, Kundera can openly address the reader and share his judgments on the character's actions. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, readers are often reminded they are reading a book, and Kundera sometimes questions them. The author's use of non-linear narrative through flashbacks and time jumps reflects Nietzsche's idea of eternal return; the book's various storylines are able to weave through time, in and out of each other because these events will reoccur endlessly.

The book's ending also demonstrates this idea of infinite reoccurrence; while Tomáš and Tereza died earlier in the book, the narrative returns to their time in the countryside.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being: Quotes

The novel's narrator has a distinct voice and is often forthright about his own thoughts and feelings on the book's characters. Here are some meaningful quotes from the narrator's perspective.

If man frees himself from the idea that all life's events will repeat infinitely, he will be granted a freeing sense of lightness. However, while this lightness is at first liberating and uplifting, it does come with a downside. When an individual's actions have no lasting impact, they are at risk of becoming unimportant and meaningless. Some of the novel's characters find that a life of lightness actually comes with its own heaviness.

The novel's narrator discusses Sabina's lightness as "unbearable" at several points. Sabina prides herself on not having attachments or commitments. Throughout the book, she easily detaches herself from situations and people. Yet this freedom comes at a cost; Sabina sometimes feels that a life of only lightness lacks meaning and connection.