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Part 4, Chapter 19
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
Later, walking home with Karenin, Tereza notices the head of a crow on the ground near a housing development. As she moves closer, two boys, who had been hidden behind a wall, run off. She sits by the crow and sees that it has been buried halfway in the dirt. She excavates it, sees that it is badly injured, and takes it home. She lays it gently, wrapped in a scarf, on the bathroom floor and waits.
The buried crow represents weight, in this case, the weight of dirt on a body. Sabina later says that being weighed down with dirt in death is her greatest fear, which is why she has cremation included in her last will and testament. Tereza metaphorically feels this weight and death in Tomas’s infidelity, and in her own encounter with the tall stranger.
Themes
