The Unbearable Lightness of Being summary

Meet Tomas, a successful surgeon living in Prague. Tomas is known for his numerous affairs and detached emotional life, following the rule of threes: he will either see a girl three times in quick succession, then never again, or he will maintain the relationship but never see his lover more than once every three weeks.

Tomas’s carefree lifestyle is challenged when he meets Tereza, a waitress in a provincial café. After being captivated by Tereza, he invites her to visit him in Prague. Eager to escape her small town and overbearing mother, Tereza accepts. Soon she’s standing at Tomas’s doorstep with her entire life packed into a suitcase.

And so the complex relationship grows. Tomas, though initially resistant, is particularly taken by Tereza. After their first night together, they wake up together holding hands – an intimacy he never normally allows or enjoys. Eventually he breaks his rule of threes, and they move in together. However, Tomas’s infidelity and womanizing remains.

In time, Tereza learns of Tomas’s infidelity after reading letters he sent to a lover – Sabina. Tereza is consumed by jealousy and insecurity, though she doesn’t leave him. Instead, she suffers the pain of his philandering and has intense and violent dreams where she’s pushing pins under her nails, or that she’s one of many unnamed women being shot by Tomas. She still feels a profound bond with Tomas, and struggles to accept him for who he is.

In her attempt to understand him, she meets and becomes friends with the lover, Sabina. Through Sabina, Tereza gets a job as a photographer, capturing pictures of the recently arrived Russian soldiers. Despite this friendship, Tereza’s jealousies remain.

Seeking to reassure Tereza, Tomas marries her. He doesn’t give up his infidelity, but he finds that he doesn’t enjoy it as much. Together, they get a dog; although it’s male, they name it Karenin, after the Russian princess in the Tolstoy book that Tereza is reading. The dog takes an immediate liking to Tereza.

Finally, amid the increasing dangers of the political turmoil, Tereza and Tomas flee to Switzerland – and a new chapter in their life.

ANALYSIS

Through the characters of Tereza and Tomas, we’re introduced to the central theme of the novel: the tension between lightness and weight. Here, Tomas represents “lightness” – his detached view of love, his determination to not be tied down. He even has a child from a previous marriage, but he’s content with the distance that has grown between them. Both emotionally and physically, Tomas seems adrift on the breeze.

Tereza, on the other hand, is the embodiment of weight. Her love and her emotions weigh on her. When she arrives in Prague to visit Tomas, she brings her entire life in a suitcase – you can imagine the literal and physical weight of that case.

The way their relationship develops shows the conflicting nature of those two opposite yet complementary concepts, and raises questions about the very nature of love. Is it freeing or binding? And can these different attitudes ever be reconciled?

As Tereza tries to find her own sense of control and identity, she turns to photojournalism – ironically at the suggestion of Tomas’s main lover, Sabina. This profession represents her own type of freedom, and ties the story to the political conflict of the time. 

Following the so-called Prague Spring – a period where the Soviet Union tightened its oppressive grip on Czechoslovakia – Tereza’s pictures of the tanks and soldiers give her life a sense of excitement and danger. This danger ultimately becomes too much, and the couple flees to the Western-aligned Switzerland.