SOURCE: “Kundera's Quartet (On The Unbearable Lightness of Being),” translated by John Anzalone, in Salmagundi, No. 73, Winter, 1987, pp. 109-18.

In the following essay, Scarpetta examines the musical structure and dominant thematic motifs in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Composition

Milan Kundera's novel opens on an abstract reflection involving certain themes of Nietzsche and Parmenides; its final part, seemingly unrelated to the actions and situations of its characters, essentially concerns the slow death of a dog. Here are indications of an overt desire to destroy the classical notion of “novelistic development” (exposition, peripeteia, reboundings, knotting and denouement). In fact, everything happens as if, for Kundera, a sense of musical composition took on increasing autonomy in the face of plot's traditional necessities. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being there is no homogeneous, centered plot, but instead a calculated tangle of semi-independent story-lines. Musical terms like variation, interval, counterpoint and restatement...