This 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 “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 back memories from her childhood. The entire passage is structured in three sections: one where she criticises her body, another where queries arise from these observations and finally one where she demonstrates her definite opinion on the situation. …show more content…
Some of these are highlighted by repetition like “very large, very dark circles”. The metaphor at the end of the paragraph on pornography conveys a feeling of vulgarity, violence and despicability. The idea of the body as a means for sex is a theme around which the passage also revolves and we are introduced to it by the inclusion of the term “pornography”. As a consequence, the reader is impacted and comprehends Tereza’s deep concerns and overall heaviness of her character. We are accustomed to long sentences from the beginning, successful tool for the author to elongate and deepen the imagery of the passage. In addition, they simulate movement and provide the reader with the idea of Tereza’s eyes moving along her skin, examining every detail of it. After this description, Kundera follows to a set of questions that arise in Tereza’s mind. This change in punctuation clearly introduces the reader into a new environment, a more philosophical one where Tereza deliberates upon the relationship between soul and body. Kundera’s choice of separating each of these thoughts into different, short paragraphs gives the sensation of thoughts flashing up in the character’s mind. Simultaneously, it pauses the reader in order to be able to answer those doubts from their own perspective. Nonetheless, Kundera grants Tereza an
In addition, the author helps the reader understand the selfishness of the mother when the reader finds out she have stole the Persian Carpet “several months before” (230) the divorce and puts the blame on Ilya, the poor blind man. Furthermore, the visit of the children is supposed to signal a fresh start for the family. The mother even emphasizes she wants the girls to come “live with [them]” (229). Yet again, even if they meet in order to reunite, characterized by a situational irony, they see themselves separated because of her mother selfish decisions.
It has many strong ties on various topics, one being the topic Pedophilia. More than Pedophilia, the novel focuses on Humbert’s obsession with youth and the love he has for his “nymphets”. As mentioned earlier, Humbert equates youth and innocence with sexual gratification and desire. More importantly this novel lacks a strong female voice, or any realistic voice for a woman. Women and girls are treated as disposable in Humbert’s eyes. Once they have served their purpose in Humbert’s eyes he can care less. The most tragic thing about this novel among its other tragedies is that a young girl's innocence was robbed from her and we as readers will never get the full extent of
The author agrees with the idea of women as victims through the characterisation of women in the short story. The women are portrayed as helpless to the torment inflicted upon them by the boy in the story. This positions readers to feel sympathy for the women but also think of the world outside the text in which women are also seen as inferior to men. “Each season provided him new ways of frightening the little girls who sat in front of him or behind him”. This statement shows that the boy’s primary target were the girls who sat next to him. This supports the tradition idea of women as the victims and compels readers to see that the women in the text are treated more or less the same as the women in the outside world. Characterisation has been used by the author to reinforce the traditional idea of women as the helpless victims.
The authore engages the use of imagery in this passage to show how the girl feels imprisoned. The
He interprets them well, as the reader directly understands the difficulties and struggles of his past experiences. Because of Ernest Hemingway’s rough childhood and raising, Hemingway's viewpoint of the soul is displayed in his images images of blackness, brightness, nothingness, and quietness or peacefulness. In “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, Ernest Hemingway shares the concept of “nada”. He proves this concept with the idea of blackness.
The sexual control of women by men is a major system within pornography, but it is not achieved through the same extreme level of violence used by Bateman, ‘in my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week.’ Under his psychopathic control body parts cease to contain any sign of female sexuality or personal identity and instead they become ‘trophies’ of his violent sexual encounters. The image of the disembodied vagina acts to cause an extreme level of shock and horror within the reader, and it is not an image that stands alone within the book. These highly disturbing scenes of sexual violence against women surpass that of pornography, this does not account the novel as being a particularly horrifying piece of pornography, but instead it sets the novel from pornography completely.
Not only this, in order to make the readers realize of her emotional solidity, the evidence of which is filled throughout the novel, the author writes that she is, “active, small, severe, that woman of unbreakable nerves.” (9) Here he suggests the initiation of a
“These Shining Lives” is about the lives and telling the story of those women with strength who work in a watch factory. This happens during the period when women increasingly starting working. This play is interesting of the aspect that how it starts in comic, but ends with tragic look at how women find jobs concerned with profit rather than safety.
An unexpectedly adverse environment can stimulate the evolution of an individual’s perspective, precipitating an emotional paradigm shift. The hyperbolic simile and infernal allusion with “Black as the Pit from pole to pole” illustrates the magnitude of the persona’s indefinite suffering, foreshadowing death and a bleak perspective on life with a melancholic atmosphere. We see the personification in “night that covers me”, where “night” is metaphorical for the persona’s suffering, demonstrate the arduousness in surmounting unpredictable challenges, reinforcing the persona’s misfortune and its ramifications are perpetual. However, the plosive consonants with the alliterated “b”, emphasising the bludgeoning, and metaphor in “Under the bludgeonings of chance/My head is bloody, but unbowed” conveys you, me and the persona as prisoners of probability being bombarded with challenges, highlighting the capricious difficulties and detriments affecting the individual. Moreover, the visual imagery and caesura in “My head is bloody, but unbowed” suggests the physically scarred persona will not submissively bow defeated, but will endure the bludgeoning, accentuating the persona’s emerging inner strength. It is clear to us the arousal of inner strength contrasts
After analysing the level of uncertainty which arises, both in the narrative and the reader’s experience, ‘stream of consciousness’ adds to the narrative a more immediate and a more powerful shift of viewpoints. When Joana stops the narrator’s narrative of her own life story through the exclamatory sentence ‘No, no, I want no god, I want to be alone.’ (193), Joana imposes her will through her intervention in the narrative; Joana turns, as a result, the narrative more personal. Also, the subject pronoun ‘I’ preserves the existent intimacy between character and reader besides the theme of uncertainty discussed earlier. Moreover, the more Joana takes control over the narrative, the more Joana is in control of her life. The reader senses that Joana
From the first, he juxtaposes the ordinary with the sexual in his descriptive odes to love as well as simple statement reflecting her youth. The juxtaposition of youth and sexual desire is the driving force behind the novel and the controversy. The wording, however, is a mixture of romantic lyricism and obscene allusion. The tension is derived through the sensuous beauty of the words rather than the image of the young girl, just “four feet ten”. “The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps” refers to Humbert’s tongue and the palate he wishes to “tap at three on the teeth” is Lolita’s. Evidently, Humbert’s clever choice of words masks the interdict aspect of his sexual desires for Lolita. Poetic lines such as “light of my life, fire of my loins” become fundamental in understanding the contextual allusion from immorality in Humbert’s deviant sexual desires and behavior.
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 fact, it can not be seen at all. It is the fierce absence of the word commitment that is so blatantly seen in each individual, yet the word itself is buried so deeply inside of Tomas and Tereza that it takes an animal’s steadfast and unconditional
Too often Lolita is read from only one perspective, the perspective of monstrosity. “Nabokov the pornographer threatened to expose and corrupt others, particularly children, through the publication of a novel about unnatural desire” (Whiting 835). The tendency is for the average reader to become entangled in a moral debate, to take opposition to the seemingly criminal and amoral acts of the narrator, to condemn him for his blatant and grotesque sin. This surface analysis of the text was prevalent at the time of publication, delaying the release of the novel in the United States by three years. “Most reviews of the novel [Lolita] dealt with the narrow issue of its alleged obscenity. The novel was published three years earlier in France because Nabokov could not find an American publisher ready to risk publishing it” (Tamir-Ghez 65). Critical theory since this time has uncovered multiple layers of interpretation that offer much more meaningful analysis of the novel
To start, Kundera creates conflict within his novel as characters struggle with their identities. Retrospecting on Teresa's arrival in Prague with her heavy suitcase symbolic of the heavy burden that she was to impose on his life, Tomas compares his wife-to-be to an abandoned child. He continues, “If Polybus hadn’t taken in the young Oedipus, Sophocles wouldn’t have written his most beautiful tragedy” (11). Theresa does not seek an identity beyond her relationship with Tomas as he alone is able to unify her body and soul. The first time they met, Theresa felt “Her soul rushing up through the blood vessels and pores to show itself to him”(48). For this reason, Teresa's response to her husband’s infidelity is not jealousy but the crippling loss of her own individuality which brings her to the brink of insanity. Moreover, Kundera extends the allusion to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex later in the novel through one of Theresa’s traumatic dreams in which she has been buried while Tomas has been with other women. When Tomas would return, he would attempt to remove the dirt from his wife’s eyes. Theresa responds, “I can't see anyway. I have holes instead of eyes” (227). This intertextuality, reveals that like Oedipus, Theresa’s failure to understand her own identity has led to her own beautiful tragedy, the relationship that she has with her husband. Theresa’s nightmare also reveals her conviction that she alone is responsible for her husband’s unhappiness and Theresa’s attempts to change for Tomas result in deeper conflict.
As the tourist places her plump (“swollen”) hand on the bent and fragile (“greenstick”) shoulder of the girl, she feels sympathetic towards her. The “large eyes” of the girl signify her loneliness and solitude and bring about a feeling of compassion in the reader. “Speaking darkness” has been juxtaposed in this stanza. The speaker along with an emotion of empathy also has a deep sense of admiration and respect for the girls.