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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, offers a philosophy of love and sex which appears to be very pessimistic, but at the same time offers a shred of hope that some measure of happiness, or at least acceptance, can be won in a world in which there is no longer any unassailable truth or faith holding the individual to life. This is the meaning of the title. Without any of the religious, psychological, philosophical, political or romantic beliefs of the past to cling to, the individual must suffer "the unbearable lightness of being." He or she must look for love in a world which seems to be created precisely to keep human beings from finding the love they so desperately seek. It is not a surprise, then, to find that the physical act of sex is generally shown to be an exciting, if temporary, substitute for true love and intimacy. It is also not a surprise to find that this sex often leaves the characters in a more desperate state than they experienced before sex:

When Tereza unexpectedly came to visit Tomas in Prague, he made love to her, . . . but suddenly thereafter she became feverish. As she lay in his bed and he stood over her, he had the irrepressible feeling that she was a child who had been put in a bulrush basket and sent downstream to him (175).

The characters in Kundera's novel all experience this sense of abandonment, whether they are able to articulate it or not. They feel as if there is at their core an emptiness, an unbearable lightness of being, which leads them to pursue some connection with the world, with others, which they cannot find. At the same time, Kundera's book is not utterly without hope. As long as the individual is willing to settle for some temporary sense of belonging, whether in love or sex or both, then he or she will at least catch a glimpse of something resembling happiness in the midst of that abandonment:

On they danced to the strains of the piano and the violin. Tereza ...

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:33, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690497.html