Unbearable Lightness of Being

1. Unbearable Lightness of Being Part Four Body and Soul

2. Highlights • Language • Shifts in the Narrator • Counterparts in threes • Lists 163 (part 87) • Smiling 141, 145 147-148 • Blindness 149, 153, 164, 167 • Self 138 • Betrayal 142, 166, 169-170 • Lightness 142 • Death and crows 159-160 • Choice • Trees 151 • Changes • Mirror 161 • Benches 171 • Threes 149, 152 • Body 155, 156, 157, 161 • Photography 167

3. Narrator • Creates own self as he tells the story • Creator of characters and director of the test • Gives narrator visibility in the story and a potential omniscience • Narrator intentionally limits his power to avoid subjugating his characters to the thematic totalitarian rule they try to escape • Chooses narrative techniques to create an open-ended structure • This way the theme of freedom and the characters desire for freedom supports each other • This is achieved by giving advance notice • “we will see you later” “one will see later” • Temporal disorder • He manipulates time through the chronological displacement

4. Page 133. " Prochazka " • Jan Procházka (1929-1971) was a Czech film scenarist and prose writer, and author of Long Live the Republic. He was one of the radical socialist members of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, along with Kundera, LudvíkVaculik (see Bookmark for “the Two Thousand Words, page 211), and Ivan Klíma. At a Communist Party summit in Dresden, East Germany, in March 1968, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev (see Bookmark, page 199) gave a speech that openly accused Prochazka of leading a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. • As Tomas says, Prochazka was “one of the best-loved figures of the Prague Spring” (Bookmarks, pages 25 and 26). The celebrated Czech playwright Václav Havel, who would be elected president of the Czech Republic in 1989, after the Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communist rule, mentions Prochazka’s activities around the time of the Prague Spring several times in his book-length interview-memoir Disturbing the Peace • As Kundera relates via the narrator of Unbearable Lightness, the Communist regime tried to humiliate Prochazka by broadcasting private conversations picked up by bugs in the flat of a professor friend of his, two years before. The narrator finishes the story later (section 19 of Part Five, pages 228-229), by noting that two weeks after the broadcasts, Prochazka entered the hospital with terminal cancer, and even “was operated on in the presence of the police

5. Page 141. " John F. Kennedy " • John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy (1917-1963) was the 35th President of the United States. He served with distinction in World War II as commander of Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109, then was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate on behalf of the state of Massachusetts from 1947 until his election to the Presidency in 1960. • A photo of the late American president (assassinated five years before main portion of the Unbearable Lightness) hangs on the wall of “the ambassador,” formerly an actual ambassador who lost his position after the Russian takeover and now has a job as night attendant at the hotel where Tereza gets a job waiting tables at the bar. • The Kennedy portrait is mentioned again later, when Tereza discusses the mysterious engineer with "the ambassador" (section 24 of Part Four, page 163). • Kennedy became a symbol of youth and freedom for people and nations all over the world in the 1960s. Many countries who had very little to do with the United States otherwise put Kennedy on their postage stamps.

6. Page 153. " Sophocles’ Oedipus " • On the surface, the play appears in the story here as a reminder to Tereza of her beloved Tomas, because he had given her a copy early in their relationship, which helps to calm her as she prepares to have sex with a relative stranger -- the engineer who has been trying to pick her up at the bar where she works. Seeing the familiar book “made her feel as though Tomas had purposely left a trace, a message that her presence here was his doing”; that, as the narrator said a page or two before, “she was actually being sent to him [the engineer] by Tomas.” • Sophocles’ play deals directly with themes of fate and free will (which relates to Beethoven’s “Es muss sein!” and Tereza’s notion that she is going to bed with the engineer in accordance with Tomas’s wishes) and state control (another huge theme in Unbearable Lightness). • Note that Sophocles was first mentioned very early in this book (page 11). A little later (section 24 of Part Four, page 164 in this edition), when Tereza begins to wonder whether the seduction might not have been wrapped up in secret police surveillance activity, she will also have occasion to wonder what a copy of the play was doing in the engineer’s flat. • Finally, at the start of Part Five, “Lightness and Weight” (pages 175-176), the narrator reminds us that Tomas gave Tereza a copy of the play at the beginning of their relationship, and tells the story of Oedipus in more detail because Tomas will use the myth as the basis for his essay about the culpability of people under a Communist dictatorship -- the essay that will cause him to lose his job as a surgeon in a Prague hospital.

7. Page 156. " Venice of shit " • Kundera is not actually referring to the Italian island city of Venice here. The narrator coins a metaphor for the networks of sewer systems that lie hidden beneath most cities, which serve the purpose of making “the body forget how paltry it is”; which is to say, they help to stave off the reality of our mortality.

8. Locate an example of each narrative characteristic. • Analyze the impact of each example as it relates to developing the major themes. • You should have seven examples and seven pieces of analysis • 15 points