Living Life: Which Is Right and Wrong?

Living Life: Which is Right and Wrong?

Life itself is full of mysteries which makes people question many things in our lives. Not everything we want happens the way we wanted it to be, thus having different mood and emotion in every situation we deal with. In some parts of our lives, we focus on education, politics, love, arts, happiness, career, etc. Sometimes we even have different approaches to different problems: dealing with it nicely, rudely. It all depends on what we feel we should do; and I believe this is what Milan Kundera did in his novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.

His characters are completely different from each other especially for Tomas and Tereza, and Sabina and Franz, in which Tomas and Sabina share a similar feeling of lightness in the things they enjoy and Franz and Tereza share a certain feeling of burden of weight from their beliefs about many things. If the characters to a novel would be this complex, it would difficult for the author to finish the story without claiming on who is right and who is wrong. The narrator who is the author himself should stand in between and just tell the story to the readers. This is the reason why he wrote it this way.

The story, though it gives the readers an impression that it would be about love (looking at the synopsis at the back of the book), has its shares of side-story such as the politics and government in which they currently live in. Actually, while looking at the book and its title, readers would not have an idea that this book is a novel. It certainly looks like a philosophy book because of the title itself and the floating hat as cover. The title, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, clearly does not have anything to do with romantic love.

As expected, a novel written in a philosophical way, in addition to the constant commenting from the author according to the characters’ actions, is very difficult to understand; despite having the author analyze its...