The dance
Once, while Tomas, Tereza and their friends were celebrating her new job, Tereza danced with one of these friends. The author describes this dance very vividly: “They made a splendid couple on the dance floor, and Tomas found her more beautiful than ever. He looked on in amazement at the split-second precision and deference with which Tereza anticipated her partner's will. The dance seemed to him a declaration that her devotion, her ardent desire to satisfy his every whim, was not necessarily bound to his person, that if she hadn't met Tomas, she would have been ready to respond to the call of any other man she might have met instead. He had no difficulty imagining Tereza and his young colleague as lovers…” The author intentionally describes this scene in all details, in order to show how much it touched Tomas’ heart, thus he shows the power of his jealousy.
Dreams
The narrator often describes Tereza’s dreams: “Her dreams recurred like themes and variations or television series. For example, she repeatedly dreamed of cats jumping at her face and digging their claws into her skin. In another cycle she was being sent to her death. Once, when he woke her as she screamed in terror in the dead of night, she told him about it. I was at a large indoor swimming pool. There were about twenty of us. All women. We were naked and had to march around the pool. There was a basket hanging from the ceiling and a man standing in the basket. The man wore a broad-brimmed hat shading his face, but I could see it was you. You kept giving us orders. Shouting at us. We had to sing as we marched, sing and do kneebends. In a third cycle she was dead.” This extract and many others are not clear at first sight, but in the course of story the author explains each of the images and moments of these dreams. And they become really fantastically vivid embodiments of all Tereza’s fears, her thoughts and feeling. The author makes the reader feel the whole spectrum of emotions concerning Tereza’s character, while reading these descriptions off her dreams.
Needles under fingernails
The author very vividly depicts the moment when Tereza tells Tomas dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, and he feels so much compassion to her in that moment that “he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain.” Thus the author shows how close person was Tereza for Tomas, how much he loved her. It seems to the reader that his compassion was so “big” that he felt absolutely everything that she felt.
