Time, Happiness, and Eternal Return Theme Analysis

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 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Kundera references directly in the novel. Kundera uses his characters Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, and Franz to explore and refute the idea of eternal return, which he claims is “a terrifying prospect.” If life and everything in it are on a continuous loop, Kundera asserts, then “the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make.” But while Kundera points out the drawbacks of a cyclical existence, he also acknowledges its benefits. Happiness, according to Kundera, is the desire for repetition. Though Kundera dismisses the theory of eternal return—arguing that time and existence, especially human existence, are linear and occur only once—he asserts that a cyclical existence would be the key to true happiness. 

Throughout the novel, Kundera repeatedly rejects the idea of eternal return and instead claims that people only live once, and that their lives exist on a straight and fixed line within space and time. When Tomas first meets Tereza, he thinks he may be in love, but isn’t sure he wants to give up his bachelor lifestyle. This indecisiveness, according to Kundera, is to be expected. “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” In other words, existence does not repeat on a continuous loop in which one can compare and contrast decisions—it only occurs once. Kundera posits that life is like a sort of “sketch,” because people “live everything as it comes, without warning.” Yet he claims it is not an “outline” or “groundwork for something.” Instead, Kundera argues that “life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.” Because one’s life can never be known before it happens and doesn’t exist until it does, there is no way to prepare, which again dismisses the idea of eternal return. Tereza is a photographer, and she takes hundreds of pictures during the Prague Spring, a period of mass protest in 1968 that responded to Czechoslovakia becoming a Communist state after World War II. She gives much of her film undeveloped to the foreign press, but she tries to sell some photos to a magazine in Zurich about a year after the uprising. The conflict will “never recur,” Kundera writes, but the magazine isn’t interested because the pictures are “out of date.” The Prague Spring has already happened, and Tereza’s pictures are too late. Not only does this imply that events do not recur, it also emphasizes that time and events occur in a linear and chronological way.

While Kundera rejects the idea of eternal return, he also draws a parallel between cyclical time and “the idyll,” or true happiness, which suggests that a cyclical existence is the only way to achieve real happiness. According to Kundera, “the idyll” is rooted in the Old Testament of the Bible and is an image of Paradise. “Life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown,” Kundera says, “it is not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.” In other words, the repetitive nature of life in Paradise is the source of its happiness. Kundera argues that no one can give another person “the gift of the idyll,” but an animal can, which is exactly what Tereza’s dog, Karenin, does. Animals did not get expelled from Paradise, Kundera says, and “dog time cannot be plotted along a straight line.” Dog time is circular, “like the hands of a clock,” and because of this, Karenin lives a “life based on repetition.” Karenin brings this repetition to Tereza in the form of his loyalty and love, which are Tereza’s main (perhaps only) sources of happiness in life. Kundera claims that people can retain “at least a glimmer of that paradisiac idyll” if they live in the country, as Tomas and Tereza do at the end of the novel, surrounded by nature and animals and experiencing the recurring seasons. The cyclical nature of seasons and wildlife mimics that of Paradise, bringing people as close to happiness as humanly possible.      

Ultimately, Kundera argues that happiness comes from cyclical existence, which, for people at least, makes true and lasting happiness unobtainable. “Human time does not turn in a circle,” Kundera asserts, “it runs in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition.” This general unhappiness and unfulfilled desire for repetition is reflected throughout The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which, Kundera then maintains, is proof positive that life occurs only once.