SOURCE: "Milan Kundera's Use of Sexuality," in Critique, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, Spring, 1985, pp. 131-40.

In the following essay, Sturdivant suggests that Kundera uses sexuality as a means of expressing the futility and desperation of life.

In examining the work of Czechoslavakian author Milan Kundera, critic Philip Roth observes that "almost all [Kundera' s] novels, in fact all the individual parts of his latest book, find their dénouement in great scenes of coitus" (afterword, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.) Indeed, in Kundera's most recent effort, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the novelist follows a pattern earlier established in his highly acclaimed novel The Joke and his collection of short stories Laughable Loves by depicting sexuality as "the focus where all the themes of the story converge and where its deepest secrets are located." Kundera views sexuality and eroticism as "the deepest region of life" and therefore...