Lightness
The theme of “lightness” of being is one of the dominant ones in the story (no wonder, the author named the story in the same way). The narrator says in his story that we’ve got used to think about different “dramatic situations” in our lives as about a kind of “heaviness”. But the story of his character – Sabina – was “a drama not of heaviness but of lightness”. “What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.” And this “lightness’ concerns not only Sabina. Actually all the characters suffer in some way, of it. The author often asks himself what is better: heaviness or lightness? He gives as an example Parmenides’ philosophy: “He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative.” We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness? Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative. Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.”
Love
The romantic theme is prominently addressed in the story. The author shows a few storylines where love “takes place”: in relations between Tereza and Tomas, Tomas and Sabina, Sabina and Franz. The author shows on these characters how different may be this feeling. Tereza opens herself when she fells in love – this feeling gives her some freedom from her mother, job and gray life which she has before. But in some time she begins suffering of this feeling: her husband betrays her, but she loves him and cannot leave him. As for Tomas, her husband, he feels like her father – he loves her as a baby, whom he must save from everything. Sabina is his lover, and their feeling is actually something between friendship and passion, but love is also “present” here. Franz is Sabina’s second lover, he loves her, but first he doesn’t even touch her – she is a kind of masterpiece for him. And when their relations become closer, the feeling of love between them disappears. So, the author shows that love may be different, it may affect people in different way, it may either complicate or alleviate their lives.
Compassion
The author often refers to the topic of compassion. He distinguishes its different types: from the root suffering and from the root feeling. The first one means support another person only when he/she is suffering. As for the second one, “the secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain.” This type of compassion means “the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy.” Thus it is supreme for the author. And in his story he gives an example of a person who has this feeling – Tomas. But the author actually isn’t sure whether it is as pleasant as supreme: Tomas often suffers from feeling each emotion of his wife.
