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Part 5, 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
One afternoon while washing a storefront window, Tomas runs into an old colleague from the hospital. He is polite but standoffish, and Tomas knows that his position as a persecuted intellectual is no longer respected and has instead turned into something “permanent and unpleasant.”
Even though Tomas lost his job as a surgeon, he still had the respect of his colleagues for standing up to the regime, but this seems to have worn off. Now, Tomas isn’t respected at all, and since he can never be a surgeon again, this disrespect is likely permanent.
Themes
