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
Tomas figures that he has had sex with around 200 women in his lifetime, which he doesn’t think is so many. Having sex with so many women isn’t about pleasure (although the pleasure is nice). For Tomas, it is about finding the ways in which each individual woman is unique. But not just unique in general. Tomas wants to find out how each woman is sexually unique, and he wants to “conquer” it.
Again, Tomas’s attraction to sex and women is all about power and strength. He wants to “conquer” as many women as possible, meaning he wants to have power over all of them. The word “conquer” also implies violence, which Tomas often seems to associate with sex and power.
Themes
