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Part 2, Chapter 28
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time, Happiness, and Eternal Return
Lightness, Weight, and Dichotomies
Sex, Love, and Duality of Body and Soul
Words and Language
Power, Politics, and Inequality
Summary
Analysis
The narrator returns to the present moment. Tomas has a stomachache, and he can’t sleep. As Russian planes fly overhead, Tereza wakes, too. She thinks about Tomas and how he left Zurich for her and feels an intense responsibility for him. His decision has changed his fate, Tereza thinks, but then she remembers that when he arrived at the flat after leaving Zurich, a church bell in the distance had struck six o’clock.
Tereza has a special connection to the number six. It was the address of her childhood home, and it was the number of Tomas’s hotel room the night they met as well as the time Tereza got off work that day. Tomas’s arrival home at exactly six o’clock is evidence of fate to Tereza. He was destined to come back, she figures, which is why he does so at six o’clock. Her reflections here set up something of a paradox; Tomas seems to have taken charge of his fate, but at the same time, some larger force also seems to have made this choice for him.
Themes
