The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5: “Lightness and Weight”

Part 5, Chapters 1-6 Summary

As Tomáš reflects on the Czechoslovak people’s growing dissatisfaction with communism, he is struck by a connection to the Oedipal myth: Many communist officials have begun to proclaim their innocence about the atrocities committed by the government: Because they were not aware of most of these crimes, they will not accept blame for the deaths of innocent civilians after show trials. Tomáš, however, argues that Oedipus, when he became aware of his own crimes, did feel guilt and punished himself by gouging his eyes out. Tomáš’s analogy appears in essay form in a dissident paper during the spring of 1968 and garners unwanted attention. Although he’d been speaking metaphorically, the government reads his words literally and understands his essay to be calling for communist officials to gouge their own eyes out. He does manage to escape the secret police while he and Tereza are in Zurich, but upon his return he is asked to retract his article. He refuses, losing his position at the hospital as a consequence.

He first obtains work in a country hospital and then is able to move to a clinic closer to Prague. He is visited again by the secret police, but this time the representative is more insistent. He explains that Tomáš’s article has fanned anti-communist flames and that, although they have decided against prosecuting him for it, he must retract his words. They have prepared a sample statement. Tomáš reads it and panics: It is much worse than what had originally been proposed and even contains laudatory statements about the Soviet Union. He asks to be allowed to write his own statement to buy some time. He thinks perhaps that if he resigns from his current job, the police will leave him alone.

Part 5, Chapters 7-11 Summary

Tomáš is now employed as a cleaner of shop windows on the streets of Prague. There are many shop owners who take pity on the surgeon, but Tomáš finds that he is happy. He feels free. Because their schedules are so different, he rarely sees Tereza and fills his time with other women again. Here, the narrator clarifies that it is not so much sex that obsesses Tomáš, but the act of finding in each woman what differentiates her from other women. He is in search of difference. The narrator feels that among philandering men, there are two types: Those who, like Franz, look for one, fixed ideal of the feminine in all women, and those who, like Tomáš, seek what makes each woman different from others. Tomáš’s love for Tereza is entirely different from his womanizing: He does not want to conquer anything within her and he does not see her in the same light as the women with whom he has brief liaisons.

Part 5, Chapters 12-16 Summary

One morning, Tomáš finds out that a particular customer has requested him by name. It is the former editor of the newspaper that had printed Tomáš’s article, and he is accompanied by Tomáš’s estranged son. The editor would like Tomáš’s signature on a letter demanding amnesty for political prisoners. Recalling having denounced this editor by accident and recoiling from the idea of further political activity, he refuses to sign. Although both the editor and his son try to persuade him, he cannot place himself back into the sights of the secret police. When the letter is published without his signature, its impact is great.

Part 5, Chapters 17-18 Summary

Tomáš and Tereza see each other only on Sundays because of their schedule. One Sunday they visit a spa town together and find that many of its streets now have Russian names. On the way home, he realizes that returning from Zurich had been a “catastrophic” mistake. He blames Tereza for his decision. Later that night, Tereza tells Tomáš about her nightmares and he is once again filled with empathy for her.

Part 5, Chapters 19-23 Summary

During the years following the Russian invasion, many of Tomáš’s friends emigrate and many others are killed. It is a “period of funerals” (228). He develops stomach pains that are, for him, a sign of stress. Tereza finally confesses to him that she can smell other women on him frequently. The two decide to move to the country. Both he and Tereza think that he might be bored in the countryside, but political repression and state surveillance have grown so onerous in Prague that they feel they have no choice but to move.

Part 5 Analysis

Part 5 continues to engage with the theme of Totalitarian Repression. In the aftermath of Tomáš’s Oedipus article, he is visited multiple times by government censors and agents of the secret police, who want Tomáš to retract his statement. Although the first agent stipulates that the retraction need not be public, Tomáš knows that the government will keep his retraction on file and use it against him in the event that he makes any future missteps. This was a population-control tactic common among all the regimes of the Soviet Union’s various satellite states: The government maintained a vast network of files of compromising evidence against ordinary citizens that could be used to discourage law breaking of even the most banal nature. To Czech readers of Kundera’s era, this section would be particularly chilling, as almost everyone would have either had a run-in with the secret police or known someone who had.

The narrator speaks of the massive waves of emigration that happened during this period, and here again the text presents a fictionalized but largely accurate record of Czech history during the communist period. Kundera himself was part of this wave of émigrés. He left Czechoslovakia in 1975, after the deaths of his parents, and settled permanently in France. Tomáš and Tereza attempt to immigrate to Switzerland during this period, returning only because Tereza cannot stand Tomáš’s infidelities. Although he is initially happy with his decision to follow Tereza back to Prague, he begins to regret it after his Oedipus essay lands him in the crosshairs of government censors and he loses his position at the hospital. Forced to work menial jobs that he claims to Tereza he does not altogether mind, he nonetheless feels that he should have remained in Zurich. Engaging with the theme of Leitmotif and its Interpretation, Tomáš second-guesses his interpretation of the motifs that led him back to Tereza, wishing that he’d chosen lightness over weight. At the time of the decision, he cited Beethoven’s “Ess muss sein” (It must be), but now he thinks that everything is contingent and that all notions of fate or destiny are merely the human mind searching for meaning after the fact.

Tomáš’s character is further developed in this section by the narrator’s assertion that his womanizing is more about seeking individuality and difference than it is about reducing all women to interchangeable sex objects. Tomáš wants to find the small part of each woman that differentiates her from all other women, and it is for this reason that he engages in one affair after another. Here, too, Kundera engages with the theme of totalitarian repression: Tomáš’s search for difference is also a search for relief from the pervasive ideology of communism, which prioritizes the collective over the individual and values conformity over individuality. Like Sabina, Tomáš defies the regime in a hidden and abstract way by maintaining an appreciation for difference. Like Tereza, he wants the human body to signify individuality rather than generic sameness.

And yet, despite the abstractions he uses to justify his infidelities, they remain a very real source of pain for Tereza. Now that their schedules keep them apart for the entirety of the week except for Sundays, she smells other women on him constantly when she returns home to find him asleep in bed. Left to his own devices, Tomáš pursues his agenda of lightness, but his extramarital affairs only increase the burden of Tereza’s jealousy.