Unbearable Lightness of Being

Question: Who is the happiest character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being?
Answer 1: Overall, Franz was the happiest character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the beginning, Franz was a heavy character. He was leading an unhappy life, married to a woman he didn’t love (Marie-Claire), and confused about his relationship with Sabina. He was looking for a perfect woman, a woman who was like his mother. “His mother and the Platonic ideal of womanhood were one and the same.” (Kundera, 90) He thought he had found that or at least something closer to that, with Sabina. But then Sabina left him, and his worshipping the idea of Sabina made him lighter. As his life went on without the physical presence of Sabina, he got happier and happier. When he met the girl with the glasses, he finally became fully balanced and reached his maximum happiness. As seen in the following quote, one cannot be too heavy or too light and be happy at the same time. One needs to be equally balanced in both lightness and weight. “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.” (Kundera, 5)
Also, Franz lives with both his past, being his relationship with Sabina, and his present, being the girl in the glasses and his trip to Cambodia. This also balances him, for “When you live your life, it’s light, but when you remember your life it becomes heavy.” (Kalb, paraphrasing Jonah Lehrer Proust Was A Neuroscientist, 76) He and Marjane live in both the past and the present. Throughout Persepolis, Marjane remembers how her country used to be and reflects on its (then) current condition. Marjane respects revolutions, while Franz takes his respect a step further.
So why did Franz feel the need to go to Cambodia? He was a dreamer; He had gone to Cambodia for Sabina, whose eyes he felt on him the entire time. This was his original reason, but as he lay injured in bed he realized that that was not the thing he had come away with. “He had come to find out once and for all that neither parades nor Sabina but rather the girl with the glasses was his real life, his only real life! He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!” (Kundera, 274) And as we all know, "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that."(Rowling Sorcerer’s Stone, 214) And so, as Franz lay dying, he finally realized what happiness he had, and embraced it. Once he did so, his purpose in life was fulfilled, and so he died.

Answer 2: Overall, Karenin was the happiest character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As Kundera says, “Happiness is the longing for repetition.”(Kundera, 298) An animal is the happiest character in this book because “Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line.” (Kundera, 298) Perhaps animals (and, less commonly, humans) merely know their purpose and keep doing it repetitively and are not bothered by the fact that it is their sole purpose in life. They carry out their function, and are happy about it. For, as Aristotle says, “Perhaps [happiness] is best done by first ascertaining the proper function…” (Aristotle, 7) But they repeat their function because they need to practice it in a complete life. “For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one sunny day; similarly, one day or a short time does not make a man blessed and happy.” (Aristotle, 8)[1] Also, the repetition is a form of security, and creates happiness in that way too.

Other characters knew their function, and so repeated it. One is the panther in A Hunger Artist, who “seemed to carry freedom around with it… and the joy of life streamed with… ardent passion…” (Kafka, 119)He knew his function was to stay in the circus and entertain the crowds. Even some human characters were able to achieve true happiness through repetition. Vera, for example, “…possessed [happiness] to the full when she was in her garden.”(Lavin, 45) and it was true repetition because she went into her garden whenever she was at the breaking point, and, as Father Hugh says, “It’s an unthinking happiness, though.” (Lavin, 45)
Karenin’s function in life was to make Tereza happy, to be her timepiece in order to distract her from Tomas’ laying around. “He was the timepiece of their lives. In periods of despair, she would remind herself she had to hold on because of him, because he was weaker than she, weaker than perhaps even than Dubcek and their abandoned homeland.” (Kundera, 74)Tereza was supposed to cheat on Tomas with Karenin so Tomas wouldn’t feel too horribly guilty as he cheated on her. And this worked for a while. But when they moved to the country, Tomas slowly stopped cheating on Tereza, merely because there was no one left to cheat with. As Tomas started becoming more and more faithful to Tereza Karenin got sicker and sicker. Karenin’s function was slowly being taken away from him, and he didn’t know how else to live and be happy, so he died.

Answer 3: Overall, Tomas was the happiest character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Although the connection between love and happiness has been put to question many a time, I agree with Allan K. Chalmers, who said “The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.” This agrees with Aristotle’s function, but takes it a step further into a person’s poetic memory. Now, Tomas had this. His love for Tereza was so great that he would have denied his ideal woman for Tereza, as seen in his dream. “And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the “Es muss sein!” of his love to go off with Tereza…” (Kundera, 239) Others besides Tereza tried to enter Tomas’ poetic memory. As one of his mistresses said, “It’s not sensual pleasure I’m after,” she would say, “it’s happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.” (Kundera, 209)
So, Tomas had his love, but he also had to fulfill his function, almost against his will, and cater to his human nature. His function was to discover what made each woman unique, “what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to the others of her sex.” (Kundera, 200) But why did he have to have lain with them? Couldn’t he have just asked them “What makes you special?” No, because “only in sexuality does the millionth part dissimilarity become precious, because, not accessible to the public, it must be conquered.” (Kundera, 200) And so, you see why he had to sleep with them, even though he valued his relationship with Tereza so much. He didn’t see his affairs as betraying anything to her, because he didn’t let the other women into his poetic memory. This is one of the few aspects in his life that caused unhappiness; that he didn’t understand why Tereza was so hurt by his infidelity, and so that is why I tried to explain his perspective.
But when Tomas stopped working as a surgeon, it’s almost like he had completed his function, and since “Isn’t making love merely an eternal repetition of the same? Not at all.” (Kundera, 199) he couldn’t just keep doing what he had been doing. He was in the country, which aided in the appearance that he had discovered all the women possible for him. He had finally reached his function, and so started to fully appreciate Tereza. They started getting closer and closer, balancing each other out in weight and lightness. Because they reached their maximum happiness, they also died.

Conclusion: It’s not that they died happy; it’s that they died BECAUSE they were happy.


[1]I had to add this wonderful quote I found that finally fully explains Aristotle’s complete life quote, but it seemed excessive when I put it in the text. SO I put it here it the footnote! “…moments by themselves aren't enough; they're just -- they're like photographs. They move a little, they wave, but they aren't everything. You can look back on a moment and say 'In that moment I was happy' or, more often than not, 'In that moment I was uncomfortable' or 'In that moment I was sad' or 'In that moment we were all berks' but you can look back on everything and you think, 'That was good.' Because when all the moments come together, when all the songs meet up with one another, you get something whole and complete and wonderful, people you loved and people you hated and a fondness for them you may not be able to recapture but everything you remember about them being somehow more than they really were, because that's what remembering everything does.”( dorkorific and ladyjaida Shoebox Project, Part 11, page 26) http://www.lomara.org/sbp/ <- link to Shoebox Project in PDF files.