Unbearable Lightness Tomas and the Eternal Return

Unbearable Lightness

Tomas and the Eternal Return

Kundera states that "if every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross" (5). For him as well as for Nietzsche, this is frightening prospect for it places an almost insupportable burden of "responsibility…on every move we make" (5). Yet, Kundera quickly questions whether one ought to be so frightened: Why should the heavy weight of responsibility cause us to want to run away? After all, as Kundera notes, there is a relation between love and responsibility: "In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment" (5). It is this realization that Tomas comes to through his association with and love for Tereza. In one sense, Tomas represents the struggle between escape from the burden of love (through his numerous infidelities) and the ultimate lightness which results from taking up the burden (his transformation, in the end, into a faithful lover). This paper will analyze the identity formation of Tomas from the perspective of Nietzsche's idea of "Eternal Return" and show how the heaviness that Tomas associates with love becomes light.

Tomas does have love for Tereza, whom he regards with great sympathy. Although his love for her contains elements of the erotic, it is very different from the erotic love he shares with Sabina or any of the other women he sleeps with. Tereza is a woman in need (she becomes sick immediately she comes to see him and he takes care of her). Tomas' pity for her compels him to love her -- but he cannot conquer the sense that she is a burden to him. He cannot conquer this sense because he has not reconciled himself with the words of Christ, surely appreciated by his son, who converts to Christianity: "My burden is light" (Matthew 11:30). Tomas is a man without faith in God; he is also a faithless lover. He does not see in the coupling of man and woman "an image of life's most intense fulfillment" but rather an opportunity to analyze: he womanizes because he is fascinated by the innumerable little different ways that women reveal themselves during sex. Sex is not so much an expression of love for him -- partly because he does not celebrate its fullness (he and Tereza have a dog but not a child). Yet, as the burden of "escape" begins to weigh on Tomas (his women begin to take a toll on his body), he sees that the burden of Tereza, whom he has accepted yet kept at arm's length, is his only hope.