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Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

1984

Novel

A brilliant, perverse “novel of ideas, “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a novel in which reflective thought plays an unusually prominent role, and one that has a “polyphonic” structure. Polyphony, as Kundera defines it, is the fusion of “philosophy, narrative, and dream” and “the specifically novelistic essay” into “a single music.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is divided into seven parts: part 1, “Lightness and Weight”; part 2, “Soul and Body”; part 3, “Words Misunderstood”; part 4, “Soul and Body”; part 5, “Lightness and Weight”; part 6, “The Grand March”; and part 7, “Karenin's Smile.” Each part is divided into numbered subsections of varying length; this suggestion of theme and variation seems to invite the reader to find a musical analogy.

While unhesitatingly affirming the cognitive authority of the novel to “shed light on existence” Kundera is, however, equally emphatic in his seemingly contradictory insistence that “The novel…is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses. Reflection within the novel is hypothetical by its very essence.” Kundera's first paragraph reads:

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

This is an extraordinary way to begin a novel. Who is speaking? It seems that the novelist himself—not a character or a “narrator” in the conventional sense of the term—is speaking here, addressing the reader with a compelling directness, yet Kundera never resolves the uncertainty which the reader feels after the first paragraph concerning the status of such reflections. Kundera maintains that only if events were to recur would they have significance, weight: “If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre.…There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.” That which is “ephemeral, in transit”—in other words, “light”—cannot be submitted to moral judgment, Kundera asserts: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” This move accomplished, Kundera gives his argument a final twist. He recounts “a most incredible sensation” that he experienced while leafing through a book about Adolf Hitler. Certain portraits of Hitler, Kundera says, reminded him of his own childhood, and he was touched.

Some feel that Kundera's moral perversity is revealed in the deliberately provocative tone of his fiction. In any case, the opening chapter introduces the metaphorical opposition between “lightness” and “weight” that organizes much of the book, in particular the notion of “the unbearable lightness of being.” The interlocking stories of the novel's main characters all are presented in terms of the conflict between traditional concepts of moral choice and destiny (“character is fate”) and the radically opposed perspective that Kundera introduces.

Such reflections, meditations, and arguments are as integral to the novel as the stories with which they are interwoven. Indeed, the characters themselves are schematically presented—explicitly so. “It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived,” Kundera writes. Yet, by the grace of fiction, his characters live in the reader's mind—particularly Tomas and Tereza, the novel's principal pair.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Kundera, Milan. "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0564.
APA 7th
Kundera, M. (2015). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Kundera, Milan. "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.