Essay on Unbearable Lightness of being - 1044 Words

A touching and sad novel, at once a compelling love story, philosophical text, and dialogue with Frederich Nietzsche -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being is all of these and more, perhaps most importantly a manifesto of embracing nihilism. Milan Kundera opens the novel with a discourse on Nietzsches doctrine of the eternal recurrence. He rejects any view of the recurrence as being real or metaphysical. It is metaphorical he assures us. In a world of objective meaninglessness one must fall into nihilism unless one acts as if ones acts recur eternally, thus giving our acts quot;weight,quot; the weight of those choices we make, as though recurring eternally, living forever. Kundera rejects Nietzsches optimism and in compelling detail†¦show more content†¦Tomas follows in a few days, knowing that somehow this is crazy and he is condemning himself to misery, but he must go, it is his fate and he returns. In a second incident he had published a letter to the editor in a newspaper which explored the notion of being responsible for acts whether or not one KNEW the outcome. His model case was Oedipus who had no idea he was violating so many social and moral rules of his society. Tomas is speaking about those in Czechos lovakia who acted in a similar manner toward the Russians. Later on this is taken as a socially subversive point of view and he is asked to retract. For reasons he himself hardly understands he refuses and his refusal causes him to be banned as a physician and condemned to low-level manual labor, first in Prague and later on a collective farm in a rural area. But even these choice are more his fate than a choice of meaning. The notion of fate, or what Nietzsche refers to as quot;amor fatiquot; (love of fate) is the notion that nature somehow presents us with situations which we cannot escape and we simply have to bear them. Tomas must accept and bear his love for Tereza no matter how painful and hopeless. He must accept his Oedipus letter no matter the consequences. Yet, even this acceptance cannot escape the ultimate quot;unbearable lightness of being,quot; the meaninglessness of all our acts in a world in which our acts simply dont live forever. Kundera says in the last pages ofShow MoreRelated the unbearable lightness of being Essay629 Words   |  3 Pages The Unheard Voice of Commitment nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;What the reader understands of the infidelity of Milan Kundera’s characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a mere distraction from the real substance of the story and of the character’s real purpose. Kundera offers the reader a red herring and only through close examination can one dissect and abstract the true essence of each character’s thread that links them to one another in this story. For it is not clearly seen: in factRead MoreThe Unbearable Lightness Of Being By Milan Kundera1603 Words   |  7 Pageswithin every human is a battle between the two sides - these two sides are lightness and weight. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera depicts this feud in the lives of 4 tragic protagonists: Tomas, Tereza, Franz, and Sabina. These four are in a constant feud between lightness and weight, and only removing the veil of these human abstractions can lead towards a path for contentment. The Unbearable Lightness of B eing depicts this battle existing in every individual, with every person leaningRead MoreCommentary on The Unbearable Lightness of Being Essay1439 Words   |  6 PagesThis commentary will explore the use of vocabulary, punctuation and imagery by Milan Kundera in an extract of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being . The passage to be analysed is located in the fourth part of the book named â€Å"Soul and Body†. It portrays a scene where one of the main characters, Tereza, is in front of a mirror and finds herself dealing with the conflict between identity and image. Her disconformities with her body act as a trigger for this questioning to arise and bring backRead MoreTranslation Of Han Shaogongs Unbearable Lightness Of Being?1084 Words   |  5 Pagesfrequently discussed among scholars. By analyzing Han Shaogong’s the translation of Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, Liu (2010) raises the opinion of rewriting is a necessity because the ideologies in two different language cultures are different. The influence of ideology is presented during the process of the selection of literature works to translate (Liu, 2010). Unbearable Lightness of Being was introduced to China and translated because its author Milan Kundera’s country has experiencedRead MoreThe Role of Animals in the Unbearable Lightness of Being and Poems New and Collected1458 Words   |  6 Pagesanimals, usually pets, are sometimes an essential part of ones life, it is not surprising that we find frequent references to its role in works of social realism, such as Wislawa Szymborskas Poems New and Collected and Milan Kunderas Unbearable Lightness of Being. Animals in literature could be used to symbolize all sorts of things, but in particular, animals may represent the pers onality of a character. This is because as humans and animals co-exist in the same atmosphere, certain aspects of aRead More The Unbearable Lightness of Being - It is Better to Carry a Heavy Load2124 Words   |  9 PagesThe Unbearable Lightness of Being - It is Better to Carry a Heavy Load Is it better to carry a heavy load on your shoulders, or cope with the unbearable lightness of being? Phillip Kaufman coupled brilliant film techniques with wonderful acting to put together the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being based off of Milan Kunderas novel of the same title. The film is set in Prague during the spring of 1968. At this time the Russians are still trying to exercise their communist controlRead More Heavy Versus Light Reading: The Decipherment of Literary and Non-Literary Texts1750 Words   |  7 PagesLiterary and Non-Literary Texts In attempting to discriminate between the nature of a literary text and a non-literary text, a metaphor from Milan Kunderas The Unbearable Lightness of Being comes to mind. Especially in considering this same novel in contrast with a novel such as Danielle Steeles Vanished, the idea of lightness versus heaviness presents itself, and with it, a new way of approaching the decipherment of any high/low dichotomy of literariness. When the literary text is imaginedRead MoreAlternatives in Life in A Summons to New Orleans by Barbara Hall743 Words   |  3 PagesThe Unbearable lightness of choosing â€Å"Because you are in control of your life. Dont ever forget that. You are what you are because of the conscious and subconscious choices you have made.† -Barbara Hall, A Summons to New Orleans, 2000 I personally agree with the writer Jon Spayde on all the aspects he has mentioned in this paper. The writer has discoursed various facets regarding the importance of alternatives in oneâ €™s life. But, a very significant point mentioned in this article is, that whenRead MoreAnalysis of Richard Kenneys Aubade Essay459 Words   |  2 Pagesfragility or ephemerality to the poem. The prevalence of cold imagery is also remarkable. The cold setting seems to freeze not only the grass, but the moment in time at which the speaker is in. The icebox full of lightness of air could be an allusion to the book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera/translated by Michael Hein. The arc has to do with the books idea of eternal return, Nietzsches ideas of the eternal recurrence of time. However, although Kundera is a South-Asian writerRead MoreEssay about Nietzsche, Kundera, and Shit2923 Words   |  12 PagesNietzsche lived in a dead world. Milan Kundera lives in the world today. His world is dead much like Nietzsches. Denial is the focal point of society. Society assimilates difference and denies what cannot be assimilated. In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera relies on the word kitsch to describe the force of denial. Kitsch is a absolute denial of shit (Kundera 248). Kitsch is an inescapable part of the human condition.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Though Nietzsche was not aware of the word, much