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Alexander Dubcek
After Tereza’s mother gives birth to Tereza, she decides that she looks “old and ugly.” She ultimately resents Tereza for taking her youth, so she abandons Tereza and Tereza’s father. After Tereza’s father is imprisoned by the regime for anti-communist sentiments, Tereza moves back in with her mother, who makes Tereza completely miserable. Tereza’s mother believes that the world is a “vast concentration camp of bodies,” and she thinks all bodies are the same. Tereza’s mother has zero modesty, and she frequently walks around naked. She is at the root of Tereza’s hang-ups about her own body, and when Tereza moves to Prague to be with Tomas, Tereza’s mother lies and says she has cancer in an attempt to get Tereza to return home. It doesn’t work, and Tereza never sees her mother again; however, Tereza has many of her mother’s physical features, and Tereza sees her every time she looks in the mirror. Tereza tries to “banish” the parts of herself that resemble her mother, although she is never successful. In this way, Tereza and her mother are another example of eternal return in the novel, as Tereza’s mother repeats, in more or less the same way, through Tereza’s physical traits.
Tereza’s Mother Quotes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The The Unbearable Lightness of Being quotes below are all either spoken by Tereza’s Mother or refer to Tereza’s Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 2, Chapter 15
Quotes
Let me return to this dream. Its horror did not begin with Tomas’s first pistol shot; it was horrifying from the outset. Marching naked in formation with a group of naked women was for Tereza the quintessential image of horror. When she lived at home, her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What she meant by her injunction was: Your body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to shame; you have no reason to hide something that exists in millions of identical copies. In her mother’s world all bodies were the same and marched behind one another in formation. Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Unbearable Lightness of Being LitChart as a printable PDF.
Tereza’s Mother Quotes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The The Unbearable Lightness of Being quotes below are all either spoken by Tereza’s Mother or refer to Tereza’s Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 2, Chapter 15
Quotes
Let me return to this dream. Its horror did not begin with Tomas’s first pistol shot; it was horrifying from the outset. Marching naked in formation with a group of naked women was for Tereza the quintessential image of horror. When she lived at home, her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What she meant by her injunction was: Your body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to shame; you have no reason to hide something that exists in millions of identical copies. In her mother’s world all bodies were the same and marched behind one another in formation. Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
