Part Three: Ludvik Summary

Jahn goes wandering through his hometown. Everywhere he looks, he sees dejection and chipped, cracked things instead of the beauty of anything. The town resembles Ostrava for him and he cannot bear to think about it, so he turns around and walks in another direction to avoid it. He realizes that he is thinking about Ostrava after his meeting with Lucie and is projecting dismal images onto his landscape because of the memory.

Jahn then recalls the events that lead him to meet Lucie. At the time, he was quite taken with another woman named Marketa. She took everything very seriously and didn't understand jokes. Jahn, at the time, is a young man still trying to determine who he wants to be and has a number of different facades for different people. He doesn't take anything very seriously and...