Forty years of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’: The philosophies of Milan Kundera’s iconic novel

How to live a life? It seems there are two ways at the outset, these two ways are linked to two different perspectives on time. I see this as the telling of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. The novel sets out a matrix of four characters suspended between two modes of existence and two conceptions of time: a life of lightness and a life of heaviness, set against two contrasting views of time's nature – recurring or linear time. In the very beginning, the novel sets out a philosophical foreground from the ideas of Nietzsche and Parmenides, through which Kundera crafts a rich intellectual matrix of characters that invites readers to contemplate the human condition.

The perspectives on time

The two perspectives on time are mutually exclusive ideas, if you see things and happenings repeating in the world and your life, if you believe that what has happened will reoccur in some other way, if you face the same set of choices again and again in your life, you are of the view that time is recurring. Every moment is a different manifestation of eternal time. People who are given to this idea of eternal time have to deal with the...

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