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 bein

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ther a fear of love, or the burden of love as Kundera would put it. He seeks love, but is terrified of it because he does not believe he can be true to one woman. This situation is imagined in Tereza's dream: While she marched around the pool naked with a large group of other naked woman, Tomas stood over them in a basket hanging from the pool's arched roof, shouting at them, making them sing and do kneebends. The moment one of them did a faulty kneebend, he would shoot her (57). This dream symbolizes Tereza's knowledge that Tomas is a man who demands perfection from her, from any woman he is with, along with the knowledge that it will be impossible for any woman to live up to that perfection. She will inevitable fail, and he will kill her as an object of his love. Tomas, then, has built into his philosophy of love the impossibility of love. Love will fail him, sooner or later, so he can not have faith in that love. By the end of the book, however, acceptance of the fallibility of Tereza, and of himself, has allowed him to open his heart to both love and the unbearable lightness of being which makes that love so crucial and so difficult. The sex which is at the heart of the love in the book has within it the longing to be a pa

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