The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “Soul and Body”

Part 4, Chapters 1-8 Summary

In Prague, Tereza arrives home late one night and notices that Tomáš smells of another woman. The next morning, she returns with Karenin from the store and finds him intently listening to a transistor radio. The program, broadcast by the Czech secret police, features secretly recorded conversations of Czech émigrés speaking disparagingly about communism, Czechoslovak government officials, and the Soviet Union.

Tereza, no longer able to work at the weekly paper because of the photographs she took of Russian tanks during the invasion, is once again a waitress. She works long hours at a hotel bar in Prague, but the position is not as demanding as the one she held when she met Tomáš. The atmosphere of political repression that followed the Russian invasion is palpable. Men gather in the bar during her shifts, and although she finds them distasteful, she thinks idly about having an affair with one of them. Tomáš continually tries to explain to her the difference between sex and love, but she does not understand. She thinks she might grasp his meaning better if she were to explore this duality on her own.

One day, there is a verbal confrontation at the bar between a drunk man, an underage boy, a balding man (who is also drunk), and a tall man who is sympathetic to Tereza. The tall man returns several days later and flirts with her. He tells her that he is an engineer, he lives nearby, and he’d come into the hotel bar a few days prior by chance.

Part 4, Chapters 9-14 Summary

Tereza has a vision in which she tells Tomáš that she can no longer bear his infidelities. He leads her up Petrin hill, in the center of Prague. There, a firing squad awaits her. They tell her that they only shoot people who have chosen to die, and although she has not made that choice, she tells them that she has because she thinks that it is what Tomáš wants. She cannot go through with the execution, though, and leaves Petrin hill in tears. She is sure that her unwillingness to die will upset Tomáš.

Part 4, Chapters 15-19 Summary

The engineer begins pursuing Tereza, and after his third offer she accompanies him back to his flat. He lives in a small set of rooms in a working-class area of the city. While he makes her coffee, she examines his vast collection of books, taking Sophocles’s Oedipus down from the shelf. She is struck by the coincidence: Tomáš had given it to her years ago. She and the engineer have sex, and although she is attracted to him, something in her body revolts and she is overcome with the desire to spit in his face. The liaison leaves her upset and she hurries home.

Part 4, Chapters 20-21 Summary

While walking Karenin, Tereza finds a dying crow that has been partially buried by cruel children. She rescues it and brings it home but is unable to revive it. She meditates on the nature of her love with Tomáš and decides that she had nothing to offer him but fidelity.

Part 4, Chapters 22-29 Summary

Although she anticipates his return, she does not see the engineer again in her hotel bar. The angry balding man does return, and he maliciously accuses her of prostitution: He is sure that her husband could not afford the (actually quite cheap) strand of pearls she is wearing. Another man in the bar, an ambassador, witnesses this exchange and tells Tereza that the balding man is with the secret police. Tereza is sure that the engineer was a spy and that he meant to accuse her of prostitution. In retrospect, she thinks his flat looked like the confiscated home of an intellectual and that he seemed too elegant to be engineer or to belong in that flat.

She and Tomáš drive to a country village they visited six years prior. Many of the streets and buildings have been renamed for famous Russian places and figures, and she reflects on the changes the Russian invasion has brought to her country. They run into a man whom Tomáš had once operated on, and he and Tomáš have a glass of wine together in the square. Since dogs are not allowed in public spaces, Tereza returns to the car with Karenin, where she mulls over the possibility that the Czech secret police have clandestinely taken photographs of her with the engineer. She speculates that they would need more than the engineer’s testimony to convict her of any trumped-up charges, but she still does not think that she is entirely safe. The man whom Tomáš knows works on a collective farm, and Tereza contemplates moving there from Prague: They will be less visible to the secret police in the countryside than they are in the city.

Part 4 Analysis

In this section of the narrative, Tomáš and Tereza are back in Prague. During the post-invasion years depicted in Part 4, political repression intensified in Czechoslovakia. The scrutiny under which the government placed intellectuals, artists, and writers is one of the main focal points here, and the narrator continues to explore the way Totalitarian Repression shapes life for Tomáš, Tereza, and the citizens of Prague.

Part 4 is bracketed by depictions of totalitarian repression, beginning with the image of Tomáš, listening intently to a radio program broadcast by the Czechoslovakian secret police on which they air the secretly recorded, private conversations of famous dissidents. The reach of the secret police is wide, and the ease with which they invade the privacy of citizens is striking. In their own ways, both Tomáš and Tereza value privacy and buckle under the weight of governmental surveillance. Tereza is no longer able to work as a photographer because of her widely circulated photographs of the Russian invasion. This is a historically accurate representation of the intense suppression of dissident activity that happened during the “Normalizace” period that followed the invasion: The Soviet-backed Czechoslovak government worked hard to stamp out criticism of and opposition to the regime, and arrests, denunciations, and the persecution of intellectuals increased dramatically.

Tereza has an even closer encounter with the surveillance state as a result of her brief liaison with one of the patrons at the bar where she has found employment. Tereza has never been able to understand Tomáš’s claim that sexual desire and love are separate feelings, and their inability to see eye to eye on this subject is emblematic of their more fundamental disagreement regarding Lightness and Weight. When Tereza decides to test Tomáš’s claim by sleeping with an engineer she meets at the bar, the liaison threatens to introduce a new and more threatening form of weight into her life: Tereza finds her act of infidelity upsetting, but is even more distraught to find out that her partner may very well be in the employ of the secret police, and their liaison an attempt to snare Tereza in a web of false charges.

Against this backdrop of surveillance, gnawing anxiety, and fear, Tomáš continues his many affairs, finding them an indispensable source of freedom in a repressive environment, and Tereza continues to suffer from nightmares as a result. She even has a vision in which she is asked to die and feels sure that Tomáš will be disappointed in her when she cannot go through with it. Tomáš feels deeply burdened by Tereza’s jealousy, and Tereza feels deeply burdened by Tomáš’s betrayal. The tension between Lightness and Weight has become a kind of dance between them, with each searching in their own way for lightness and each imposing a weight on the other. They contemplate moving to the country to avoid the ever-watchful eye of the communist government, and Tereza hopes that Tomáš will stop his wandering if he is away from the city and its many sexual opportunities. Here again, the narrative engages with true-to-life experiences of Czech and Slovak citizens during the communist period. Many individuals and their families were forced or chose to relocate to escape the secret police, and although such movement was strictly controlled by the government, acts of internal migration like Tomáš and Tereza’s move to the countryside were common, especially during the years following the Russian invasion.