Sex, Love, and Duality of Body and Soul Theme Analysis

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being centers on the story of Tomas and Tereza, two people who fall deeply in love despite Tomas’s constant womanizing and infidelity. Tomas represents lightness—he is sexually liberated and, as a general rule, avoids heavy emotions like love—and his libertine lifestyle and aversion to commitment mean that he is free and unattached. He believes that sex and love are completely unrelated, and he has multiple mistresses, none of whom particularly mean much to him. Tereza, on the other hand, represents weight—she values monogamy and, compared to Tomas, is sexually repressed—and she believes in the power of love and lifelong commitment. For Tereza, sex and love are inextricably intertwined, and each time Tomas is unfaithful, she sees it as a direct threat to their relationship. Kundera depicts Tereza as the personification of the soul, and Tomas, who represents sex and lust rather than love, as the personification of the body. Together, Tereza and Tomas represent the dualism of body and soul, which assumes that the soul and body are two separate and distinct entities. Like most pairs of opposites in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, however, Kundera ultimately argues that the mind and body cannot be separated as easily as their seeming duality might suggest.

According to Tomas, casual sex has nothing to do with love. Casual sex is “light” and “weightless,” and it exists independent of love, which, by comparison, is heavy. Tomas believes that “love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).” Tomas desires sex with many women, but he can only sleep next to Tereza, which suggests that for him, sex and love are two totally different things. Tomas believes that “attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had.” To Tomas, the connection between love and sex is just as random as attaching sexual excitement to the sight of a bird. “If a cogwheel in Tomas’s head goes out of phase and he is excited by seeing a swallow, it has absolutely no effect on his love for Tereza,” and, Tomas argues, neither does his engagement in casual sex with other women. Just because Tomas does not love the women he has casual sex with does not mean he sees them merely as “sex objects.” On the contrary, Tomas is quite fond of many of the women he sleeps with; he simply excludes them “from the sphere of love,” which entails much more than sex and the mere meeting of bodies. 

Tereza, on the other hand, believes that love and sex are intimately linked and cannot exist independently of one another. For Tereza, the bodily act of sex cannot be extricated from love, an emotion that is rooted deep in the soul. When Tereza discovers that Tomas is unfaithful, she begins to have nightmares in which she is just one of numerous women Tomas has sex with. In Tereza’s dreams, Tomas makes “absolutely no distinction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies.” Tereza wants her body to be “irreplaceable” to Tomas, but he has “drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them,” and she therefore believes he cannot possibly love her. Tereza tries to understand Tomas’s perspective regarding love and sex, but they cannot seem to see eye to eye. “Oh, I understand,” Tereza says to Tomas. “I know you love me. I know your infidelities are no great tragedy…” Tereza’s sarcasm suggests that, to her, Tomas’s infidelities are a great tragedy. No matter how Tereza tries, she cannot reconcile Tomas’s love for her with his repeated unfaithfulness. When Tereza and Tomas have sex, Tereza screams, but not out of pleasure. Tereza’s screaming is “the naïve idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul.” The only way Tereza can accept Tomas’s betrayal is to find a way to disengage the body (sex) from the soul (love) and accept that they can never be perfectly combined.

However, it eventually becomes clear that even though body and soul cannot become one, their apparent duality doesn’t mean that they’re completely separate, either. For example, when Tereza has a one-night stand with a tall stranger to prove to herself once and for all that sex can exist without love, she immediately goes to the bathroom afterwards and empties her bowels, which suggests that Tereza’s soul, the part of her that is in love with Tomas, rejects the sexual act of her body. Similarly, after Tomas meets and falls in love with Tereza, he is not able to have sex with other women without alcohol, which implies that Tomas must first trick his soul to make his body to engage in casual sex with other women. Despite the popular philosophical opinion that the body and soul are distinct and separate, Kundera implies that like other dichotomies, the dual entities of soul and body cannot truly be separated.