The Unbearable Lightness of Being Themes

At the center of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the philosophical concept of eternal return, which assumes that everything in the universe—people, animals, events, and the like—recurs and repeats in a more or less similar fashion over infinite time and space. The theory of eternal return has been around since antiquity and can be found in ancient Indian, Greek, and Egyptian writings; however, in modernity, it is most often associated with…

As Kundera examines the philosophical concept of eternal return at the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he explains Nietzsche’s view of eternal return as “the heaviest of burdens.” The heaviness implied in Nietzsche’s understanding of eternal return makes the concept appear “unbearable” and negative, yet Kundera isn’t convinced. “But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?” he asks. To answer this question, Kundera references Parmenides, a Greek philosopher from the 5th century…

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being examines the lives of four main characters—Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, and Franz—and their conflicting and contradictory use of words and language. For instance, Tomas and Tereza define sex differently. Tereza defines sex as an intimate act between two people in a committed relationship, and she considers it the physical manifestation of her and Tomas’s love. Tomas, on the other hand, defines sex as a…

Power is constantly at play in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The novel largely takes place in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s, during a time known as the Prague Spring. In the winter of 1968, mass protests broke out across Czechoslovakia to push back against the Communist state that had been declared in the country after World War II. The protests lasted until late August, at which time the Soviet Union…