Analysis Of 'The Unbearable Lightness Of Being'

Published in 1984, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is based on two women and two men (the adulterous surgeon, Tomas, his wife, Tereza, Tomas’s mistress, Sabina, and Sabina’s one of many affairs, Franz) around the late 1960s when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. Kundera establishes a motif on cameras throughout the novel, interpreting how the camera possesses the power . Throughout historic and modern times, camera has served one as a source of power to capture, preserve the earnest depiction of what surrounds him or her, but also as a source of weapon.

In part two of the novel, Sabina invites Tereza to her house where the two discuss about photography, undressed. With the camera in her hands, Tereza

Around the time The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published, the Chinese troops broke into the Tiananmen Square to oust the weeks of demonstration by pro-democratic civilians. A shot taken by the Liu Heung-Shing shows an anonymous man anchor himself in front of the row of three Chinese tanks that were intruding. Unlike the Russian soldiers described in the novel, the Chinese government knew the omnipotence of a camera, how a single photo can influence the people. They confiscated many photographers and agencies to prevent leaking of the truth. This did not stop Liu Heung-Shing. He paid a man to sneak the film through security and pass it along to the Associated Press, where the image was displayed for the world to see. The impact the photo left still continues today. Today, China’s censor block access in the Internet to silence the talk about the gory past. Kundera continues to highlight the power of the camera lens. In the midst of political turmoil, Tereza’s job as a photojournalist has granted her with somewhat of a protection. Although the Russian soldiers and officers were given specific instructions how to react if someone fired at them or threw stones, they were not informed about how to behave if someone aimed a camera lens at them. So, as a photojournalist, it is in Tereza’s hands to document the places, the people, and the essence around her that intrigues her. The beauty but also the crude aspect about photography is that it can preserve, capture, and mirror even the most provocative incident that lies before the camera lens. Sometimes photographs can evoke emotions ranging from happiness, anger to sadness. In this case, pictures of “…tanks, of threatening fists, of houses destroyed, of corpses covered with bloodstained red-white-and-blue Czech flags, of young men on motorcycles racing full speed around the tanks and waving