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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being By Milan Kundera

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People attempt to find comfort in aligning themselves to certain polar values, whether they are things like good or bad, order or chaos, or even political values such as liberal or conservative. In these values people assign for themselves, they are searching for contentment, but within 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 Being depicts this battle existing in …show more content…

Franz, too, experiences a conflict with his weight. He falls deeply for Sabina after leaving his child and wife, and his affair soon becomes the most weighty thing in his life. Yet when “he met Sabina at the airport. As the plane gained altitude, he felt lighter and lighter. At last, he said to himself, he was living in truth” (114). Even if the lightness is just something he wants to experience and he is not truly living in lightness, he is still fighting to become light. Franz has a deep desire to be like Sabina, and he worships her for the lightness she possesses and he lacks. Kundera discusses the idea of the struggle for lightness and weight existing in the real world as well. Yakov Stalin, the son of Joseph Stalin, experienced the highest degree of this internal conflict: “Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe - no one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other” (244). Kundera notes that the poles of lightness and weight are dizzyingly close, and it is this dizziness that drives Yakov to try to kill himself. The conflict inside him is so uncomfortable that he sees the need to end his life just to stop it. This proves that lightness and weight, rather than allowing people to find contentment, only drives people further away from it.

The way an individual aligns

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