Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time, Happiness, and Eternal Return
Lightness, Weight, and Dichotomies
Sex, Love, and Duality of Body and Soul
Words and Language
Power, Politics, and Inequality
Summary
Analysis
Tereza soon comes to understand that her three reoccurring nightmares are meant to accuse Tomas of his infidelity. She knows that Tomas loves her, and that he sees his mistresses as no threat to his love for Tereza, but she grows to fear the night and her dreams. Her life is “split” between the competing forces of day and night.
The “split” between day and night is yet another opposite, or dichotomy. Tereza understands that sex and love cannot be completely separated, regardless of what Tomas says, and she is tortured by her repeated nightmares of Tomas’s infidelity.
Themes
