Sabina's Ideology In The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

Beyond the Dimensions of a Canvas: An exploration on Sabina’s Ideology in the Unbearable Lightness of Being
In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the text progresses under the historical setting of the Prague Spring during the 1960s. The protagonists have their own ideology of the overpowering regime they live under, with the most rebellious of the four being Sabina, the artist. Sabina, who is presented as a freelance artist as well as a sexually liberal character in the text, refutes the kitschy regime in several ways: the description and inspiration of her eccentric artwork, her sexual relationships with other protagonists, including her reluctance towards her father as a vindication for her life motto--“betrayal”. These elements

On a physical level, penetration is, literally, getting inside of her, ignoring her outer appearance and feeling sexual pleasure from the inside. On a psychological level, being a “light” character like Tomas, Sabina takes on love and sex as different matters. As some people would think of love and sex as the same entity, like Sabina’s other lover, Franz, intercourse was a way to disprove that notion through her idea about the superficial surface and the empty core. Franz thought that Sabina would be “Charmed by his ability to be faithful” (Kundera 91), but Sabina understands that their relationship is purely sexual, and that how Franz thinks of love was something on the surface. Taking this idea to her notion of kitsch, love was the outer surface, the intelligible lie that can allow Franz to have Sabina for the rest of his life, but deep down, the unintelligible truth was how Sabina knows their relationship is merely sexual. Her notion of the kitschy-ness of love and sex does not fully show how she is special, since there are some people, like Tomas, who treat love and sex differently, but this does place her out from the crowd of the seemingly innocuous people who think that there must be love in order to have