682 Kundera, Milan
him: “He fell asleep by her side. When he woke up
the next morning, he found Tereza who was still
asleep, holding his hand.” And Tomas is perfectly
aware that “spending the night together was the
corpus delicti of love.” This awareness marks a real
transformation in Tomas’s life of inveterate bachelor
and Casanova; he has never felt the same “com-
passion” he now feels for Tereza. As the text itself
suggests, “metaphors are dangerous,” and “a single
metaphor can give birth to love”: The association
between Tereza knocking on Tomas’s door carrying
two heavy suitcases, and the biblical “child put in a
pitch-daubed bulrush and sent downstream,” is the
main cause of his love for her. In Tomas’s philosophy,
making love with a woman is not linked with the
passion of sleeping with her: “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).”
The love affair with Sabina is very deep as well,
even if they both decide to leave their relationship
to the status of infrequent meetings. Tomas loves
Sabina because she accepts him as he is, without
being jealous for his other dealings. She is a thor-
ough individualist but, at the same time, she is
capable of great abnegation. Her love and esteem for
Tomas stretch to the point of helping Tereza to find
a good job as a photographer, even if she is inexpe-
rienced: “When Sabina herself introduced Tereza to
everyone on the weekly, Tomas knew he had never
had a better friend as a mistress than Sabina.” When
Tomas meets Sabina in Zurich, while on voluntary
exile from Czechoslovakia, he thinks that his life
with Sabina and Tereza is marvelous: “he thought
happily that he carried his way of living with him
as a snail carries his house. Tereza and Sabina rep-
resented the two poles of his life, separate and irrec-
oncilable, yet equally appealing.” He is eventually
forced to choose, for Tereza goes back to Prague and
he can either be completely free in Zurich, or join
Tereza and be oppressed by the communist regime.
He chooses the second option, bidding farewell to
Sabina and Zurich’s “unbearable lightness” to go
back to his “heavy” roots, Prague and Tereza, even
though his choice is irreversible.
Tania Collani
oppreSSion in The Unbearable Lightness
of Being
Kundera’s novel covers the whole spectrum of
human oppression: from oppression caused by intri-
cate love relationships, down to the sense of subju-
gation induced by a peculiar political situation (both
of them seen through Tomas and Tereza’s eyes), and
the aesthetic oppression caused by the standardiza-
tion of ugliness (shown from the painter Sabina’s
perspective).
The theory that opposites attract is undoubt-
edly true for Tomas and Tereza. Tomas is in fact a
modern Casanova who is really in love with his wife,
Tereza, but cannot avoid having sexual relationships
with other women. Loving women’s bodies is seen
by him as a natural impulse, and he manages not to
confuse physical attraction with real love. On the
contrary, Tereza is faithful to him and thinks that
real love shows itself through monogamous relation-
ships. She is perfectly aware of Tomas’s unfaithful-
ness, and she spends all her life trying to stop her
husband from seeing other women. That is to say,
she is oppressed by this situation, because she knows
that Tomas loves her, even though he makes love to
other women. As a result, she oppresses Tomas by
intervening in both their lives, trying to change this
state of things.
Tereza is haunted by her own jealousy, especially
at night: Her recurrent dreams bring out all her
anxieties about her relationship with Tomas. In one
case, Tereza dreams of being ordered by Tomas to
stand in a corner while he makes love to Sabina:
“the sight caused Tereza intolerable suffering” and,
in order to alleviate “the pain in her heart by pains of
the flesh, she jabbed needles under her fingernails.”
In another case, she dreams of being sent to death
by Tomas himself, who ordered her and another
group of naked women to march around a pool; as
Tereza tells Tomas, “you never took your eyes off us,
and the minute we did something wrong, you would
shoot.” Tereza’s lack of quiet sleep is of course due to
his husband’s inconsistency: “first he disavowed his
infidelities, then he tried to justify them.”
Tereza’s accounts of her restless nights induce a
strong sense of subjugation in Tomas. First of all,
he understands that since Tereza lives with him,
he has no more private life, as proved by the fact