The Unbearable Lightness of Being 681Little by little, her radical feelings change,
becoming more mature and more complex. The
sense of hate toward the humiliation of President
Dubcek’s speech to the nation, diminishes as time
goes by: “Thinking in Zurich of those days, she
no longer felt any aversion to the man The word
‘weak’ no longer sounded like a verdict.” Through
deep introspection, she manages to understand that
she has nothing to share with Switzerland, with its
valuation of success at all costs, and that she cannot
resign herself to being a fashion photographer: “She
realized that she belonged among the weak, in the
camp of the weak, in the country of the weak, and
that she had to be faithful to them precisely because
they were weak.” That’s why she decides to go back
to her country, even if she is aware that her decision
will affect her and her husband’s future. Once back,
she is confronted by another huge loss of iden-
tity: All the leading figures before 1968 have been
replaced by people who consented to the invasion.
Tomas, once a famous surgeon, becomes a window
washer; Tereza becomes a barmaid and she works
with a former diplomat, who keeps on his desk a
photograph of his meeting with a smiling Kennedy.
Everything is different from what it was before;
but her suffering is more bearable than her lack of
identity.
On the contrary, the painter Sabina worships her
feeling of unfaithfulness toward both her father and
communism. Her identity is not formed by moral-
ist lessons, but by beautiful ideas: “Betrayal means
breaking ranks and going off into the unknown.”
She doesn’t feel any particular sense of loss con-
nected to the political situation. Once she “allowed
herself to be taken along to a gathering of fel-
low émigrés,” and she loathed their meaningless
speeches: “she asked herself why she should bother
to maintain contact with Czechs. What bound her
to them? The landscape? If each of them were asked
to say what the name of his native country evoked
in him, the images that came to mind would be
so different as to rule out all possibility of unity.”
Sabina’s aesthetic perspective prevents her from feel-
ing a sense of belonging to a nation due to shared
political views. Since only personal values count
for her, her only link to her country is the image of
the “cemetery” and her friends, Tomas and Tereza.
When she finally learns that Tereza and Tomas died
in an accident, she feels that “the last link to her past
had been broken.”
Tania Collanilove in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being the
reader is faced with two main types of love: on
the one hand, the main love affair between Tomas
and Tereza, ending with their marriage and a life
together; on the other hand, the love affair between
Tomas and the painter Sabina, which is primarily
based on sex and on the thrill of eccentricity and
instability.
In both cases, it is interesting to see how all
characters are (metaphorically) sterile, and content
to be involved in sterile love stories: Only Tomas
has a son “by mistake” from his first wife, but at no
moment does he feel compassion for him or regret
at having left him with his mother. Halfway through
the novel, when Tereza and Tomas are already fallen
into misery because of the communist regime, she
tells him, relieved: “I’m beginning to be grateful to
you for not wanting to have children.” However,
seen through Sabina’s eyes, the fact of not having
children is also a way to escape the holy decree “Be
fruitful and multiply.”
The main love affair between Tomas and Tereza
is characterized by a huge tension between Tomas’s
infidelity and Tereza’s will to change his nature.
Nonetheless, however unfaithful, Tomas is truthfully
in love with Tereza, and he feels all the frightening
“symptoms” of love: “But was it love? The feeling of
wanting to die beside her.” Tomas’s spur to infidelity
responds to a philosophical issue he is confronted
with from the beginning of the novel: “What hap-
pens but once . . . might as well not have happened
at all.” A consequence of this assumption is the fact
that people live only one life, which means that they
can make mistakes, but have no chance to do bet-
ter in another life. That’s why Tomas cannot avoid
going to bed with a large number of women: He
wants to test all possibilities of material love, even
though he doesn’t debate his love and relationship
with Tereza.
As a matter of fact, Tereza is the first woman,
after Tomas’s divorce, to spend a whole night with