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
By Tomas’s third year washing windows, it is no longer a vacation. One day, while Tomas is walking home from work, a woman who obviously knows him approaches him in the street. The way she speaks to him suggests that they have been intimate, but Tomas can’t remember her. Tomas is exhausted. He cannot extend this vacation indefinitely.
Tomas seems to be losing steam as the perpetual womanizer, which suggests that his behavior isn’t as light as he originally thought. He is exhausted, and this implies that Tomas is bogged down by his sexual exploits instead of freed by them.
Themes
