Unbearable Lightness of Being
The relationship between Tomas and Tereza is torn into emotional chaos so many times that a reader can easily begin to wonder if they really like one another or if they are just kind of riding it out together. After all the story is set in the middle of a political crisis, with the massive Soviet show of force making everyone nervous and fearful. It might cross the mind of a reader that this couple has carved out a survival kind of relationship, like a man and a woman who were both lost in a deep woods, found each other, and now need each other to stay alive with all the dangerous animals around.And the history of the Cold War period is one of tremendous tensions for people in Europe, who haven't really recovered from World War II yet, and all its bloodshed and fright. This couple was set in this novel by Milan Kundera, the reader understands, partly because of his own desire to show the world what it was like when those tanks rumbled into Prague, taking away any hope of a true democracy behind the "iron curtain." So it is easy to understand how an alert reader (who has done a little research on Kundera's life and times) could come to believe that Tomas and Tereza are thrown into the mix of the Cold War and the Soviets and the
You have to have romance in a novel (most novels anyway), but the characters do not always have to be really in love. And after the shaky relationship with his first wife Sabina, Tomas is very hesitant to be seriously in love again. This takes a reader by surprise during the novel because how could a woman still be attracted to a man who keeps going out and finding attractive women to have affairs with? It is not hard to imagine their initial attraction, it's like the birds and the bees, man meets woman, boy meets girl, and there is something sensual, physical, and emotional that attracts them. aftermath of World War II through fiction, for the sake of making the novel interesting. It is that people in Prague and in Czechoslovakia had very high hopes - idealistic almost romantic hopes - that their country would become the democratic paradise that no other Iron Curtain country would be able to become. His personal rule had been that he doesn't have a woman over to his apartment for the whole night, but he allows Tereza to stay the first night she arrives. But boom, along comes the Soviet Union with tanks and soldiers to snuff out these idealistic hopes of democracy and freedom. The reader also knows that Tereza must be very intelligent too, because she has a copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina under her arm when she meets Tomas in the hotel where he is staying. And as for Tereza, she is waiting on tables in the beginning of the novel but is clearly a person of some substance, and has the courage to just pack up and leave her menial job. There is another metaphor here that Kundera has built into the novel that also sheds light on the relationship between Tomas and Tereza. Just like that scenario, Tereza has these idealistic hopes that Tomas has changed her life and she is really close to heaven with this new man. And Tomas didn't marry her just because he felt sorry for her, or wanted to have a permanent woman around to come home to. In the beginning she must think that she has truly discovered a gold mine in Tomas, because he is a good looking man of means and skills, a respected doctor, a good lover, someone who shares her revulsion for the military invasion into Prague. This is not a situation with these two that is happening because it's "us against the world" at all; they were brought together on a totally chance meeting and she pursued him, he fell for her, and they were locked into a love even though the world around them was falling apart and he was addicted to the notion of finding women and having sex with them. This is mentioned because a reader believes that after a bright and well-educated man has made up his mind not to become involved, and a new woman comes into his life that makes him turn away from his own commitment not to be involved, he must like her.
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Acceptance Essays
