The Unbearable Lightness of Being is considered to be a postmodern novel. Kundera's story depicts interweaving of four people’s fates: Tomas, Tereza, Sabina and Franz. Tomas meets Tereza in a small café in a small town where she works as a waitress. They fell in love with each other. But it’s not in Tomas’ nature to have just one and only woman. He has many “fancy” women, and Sabina is one of them. But Sabina is also not monogamous – her philosophy is in considering betrayal as the highest pleasure. So she has one more man in her life – Franz (who has a wife as well as Sabina’s first lover and Sabina is also just a “fancy” woman for him).
The story is built with the method of framing – the narrator ponders over life, its philosophy, and as some kind of example for his thoughts he tells the story with four main characters. And this story is also “filled” with the author’s conception: he describes each character’s emotion, thought, feeling. Thus he helps the reader look at their inner worlds more deeply.
The author develops many philosophical ideas in his work, and among them – Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence (universe and all events which take place there occur infinite times, constantly repeating), though, as for the narrator, he follows the idea that a man lives only one life, and it will happen never again.
The main conflict which develops throughout the story, isn’t absolutely clear. The author lets the reader to guess about it himself/herself. But it seems that protagonists of the story are its characters themselves, and on the other side, their antagonists are their fates, their essences, and the “unbearable lightness of being” which presses them down.
