SOURCE: “Longing for Paradise: The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” in Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs, University of South Carolina Press, 1993, pp. 105-33.

In the following essay, Misurella provides an overview of the narrative structure, major themes, characters, and recurring motifs in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

—The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The ending of The Farewell Party, almost theatrical with its closing emphasis on lights, shadows, and the players walking off the platform into the dark, may remind some readers of the end of The Tempest, where Shakespeare, through the character of Prospero, is said to bid farewell to his art. In certain ways the ending of The Farewell Party is also a good-bye of sorts: to Czechoslovakia and, according to Peter Kussi, one of Kundera's translators, to Kundera's former style of writing...