SOURCE: “The Narrator in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 217-26.

In the following essay, Pichova examines the role of the narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as active character, omniscient observer, and interloper whose manipulations allude to the psychological conditions of totalitarianism.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being features a narrator whose presence in the text is no less important than that of any other character. The narrator creates his own self as he tells the story. He achieves this not only by narrating but also by adopting the function of a creator of characters and a director of the text. These functions give the narrator visibility within the story and grant him a potential omniscience through which he could control his fictional personae and their world completely. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, however, the...