The uniqueness that Tereza unhappil

The uniqueness that Tereza unhappily insists upon in her narrative can be understood, I think, as a natural part of narrative. This is what Kundera is getting at, in part, when he notes that we cannot ever judge choices, since we never live out the implications of each option. We are caught within a particular point of view that always evaluates each choice from within that narrative, not from outside it. A sense of inevitability is natural, Kundera seems to suggest, to living within time. It is impossible to escape that inevitability in an animal-like way. Rather, narrative means being caught between lightness and weight as we shuffle between an awareness of the causality of events and the particular perspective from which we view them in time. Kundera touches on this concern for the perspective from which events are viewed in the way that he characterizes Tomas, the figure for Tereza of escape from the dialectic of uniqueness and uniformity. Tomas is both a surgeon and an obsessive adulterer. Kundera explores the relation between these two aspects of this character: