the unbearable lightness of being author

It isn’t until the third chapter that he even introduces Tereza and Tomas, the main characters, and even then he does it in the context of his own mind: “I have been thinking about Tomas for many years” (6). It is this narrator who we spend the first two chapters with, who has us mulling over the Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return and his own arguments against the idea. What had compelled me about this visible narrator in the first place? I’ll tell you: that he is spinning some interesting ideas and that he is an interesting character in his own right. He never pretends that his characters are real, yet I loved it most of the way through. He’d been intruding on his so-called story practically from the start, and on page 239, he comes right out and admits his fraud, musing, “…characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nut shell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about” (239). But, in the last pages, I began to feel cheated, like the whole thing had been a sham.

The cool one who could mold and shape me with his impressive way of talking about meaningful things in beautiful words, but feared vulnerability so much that is made him quite cruel in the end.įor most of the book, I was lying on my belly, chin in my cupped hand, entranced by his familiar voice. The narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is familiar to me.

The unbearable lightness of being author