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Alicia Roddenberg
Dr. Hobbs
Eng 122 CA16
03-25-09
Feeling of being trapped
From Milan Kundera’s “The unbearable lightness of being” one of the main characters is Tereza, who is very similar to the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Though Kundera’s work is a novel and allows for Tereza to be a full round character, Gilman uses the first person point of view to allow for a lot of information to be known about her character. In both stories the Theme helps to represent the characters, if the structure of the story was different the characters would be affected differently. Both of these women in Kundera and Gilman’s works are feeling entrapment in there lives, yet they are abiding by what is requested from their partner.
Kundera’s work “The unbearable lightness of being” is arranged with an omniscient narrator and told in a non sequential order. Though at times the reader many feel lost, at the end of the story it all becomes clear. Gilman presented her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in a completely different format. The narrator is a major participant who is telling the reader her own story. As the narrator writes of her experiences you read what she writes. This allows for a close understanding oh how the character actually feels. Kundera develops his story in a different manner. He is reluctant to tell who is narrating the story, but give great detail in most of his characters. Tereza has a background story developed as well as her emotions and feelings are shown.
Both main characters in Kundera and Gilman’s stories are woman of mid-thirties, who at this time of their lives are married. The two women are relatable because of a specific feeling they have of being trapped within the life they are currently living. Though Kundera’s Tereza never admits she is trapped in her lifestyle, it is obvious when Tomas sends her up the hill to determine her already predetermined fate. “It would have been easy to say “No, No! It wasn’t my choice at all!” But she could not imagine disappoint Tomas” (Kundera 159). Tereza is always looking to please Tomas, and rarely herself. There is a point in the story where Tereza does as Tomas does by having an affair; she is extremely hesitant until she sees the book of Sophocles’ Oedipus. “It made her feel as though Tomas had purposely left a trace, a message that her presence here was his doing” (Kundera 164). If Tereza had not felt that push from Tomas, she would never have betrayed him.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Gilman, we do not know the name of the narrator, just that she is a woman married to a physician named John. “I sometimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus- but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad” (Gilman 83). The woman is concealed in the top bedroom of a colonial mansion all summer because isolation was supposed to be a rest cure. The room in which she is supposed to rest in is covered by this horrid wallpaper “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman 84). She is being kept in this room by her husband, which is similar to Teresa’s story in Kundera’s work. She is in fear of being a hassle to her husband so regardless of her happiness does as she is told.
Both Tereza and the narrator in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” are set to please their partners, even if what is pushed upon them isn’t in there best interest. Gilman’s narrator after being forced to stare at the wallpaper everyday begins to feel apart of it, that she came from it. The feeling of being trapped is literal and figurative in this story; she is trapped within the room as well as her own mind. Tereza from Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of being” though betrayed by the man she loves daily, knows what her life would be without him, and for that goes against her better judgment and stays with him believing that their love is strong enough. The endings to both of these stories are completely different. Gilman’s narrator locks herself in the room, where she proceeds to lose her mind alone as she waits for her husband to return, where as Kundera has Tereza and Tomas grow old together regardless of what he had done to her.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper”. A Prentice Hall pocket reader Literature.
edited by Mary McAleer Balkun. Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2005. pages 82-96.
Kundera, Milan. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2008.
Roberts, Edgar V. Writing about Literature. Brief 11th ed. Saddle River, NJ: Pearson,
2006. page 155-69.

Allyn Tuff
Dr. Hobbs
English 122 CA 16
4-25-2009
Comparison of Franz from Unbearable Lightness of Being and Jackie from First Confession.
In First Confession, Frank O’ Conner writes about a boy named Jackie is faced with the stress of his first confession to the Catholic Church. In comparison, Franz from the novel Unbearable Lightness of Being is also faced with the stress of a confession, but this confession has to do with his wife. The comparison between these two is that they both have to make a life changing confession to someone of great importance to their lives, but what I want to focus on is the similar sequence of events that happens to both of them. They are terrified but determined to make this confession, and during the process they both are set back, but get back into it and complete the job.
“I was scared to death of confession” (O'Conner 235) said Jackie. Jackie has been convinced that he has to make a perfect confession or else he will go to hell. The problem is that he has sinned a lot in his seven years of life, and doesn’t know how it could ever be possible to confess the right way with all of those sins on his first time. Of course it doesn’t help when his sister says things like “Isn’t it a terrible pity you weren’t a good boy?” (O'Conner 235) Jackie is faced with an ordeal that he has to eventually overcome or else he is threatened with the eternal life of hell. When Jackie gets to the confessing booth, he is confused and didn’t know what to do. Because this happened, the Priest got upset and sent him to the end of the line to go last. This was a very big letdown for Jackie, but he sticks to the plan to confess instead of giving up. When he gets back to the booth, he found that the priest was very helpful, and he confessed very appropriately and ended up only getting three Hail Marys. Jackie completed what his goal was to do, and was happy with his outcome.
“From the time Franz met Sabina, however, Franz had been living lies” (Kundera 121) said the Milan Kundera, the author of the novel Franz is in. Franz is tired of the lie he has been telling his wife. He has been having a separate relationship with a mistress named Sabina for quite some time. Franz finds that he is not in love with his wife, but in love with Sabina. He knows he has to tell his wife about the second relationship, but he is scared that his wife will take it horribly bad and hurt herself like she threatened to do before. Franz finally comes to the conclusion that he is going to confess his secret to his wife, and stay with Sabina for the rest of his life. Once Franz finally confesses to his wife, Sabina left town never to be seen again, leaving Franz devastated. Sabina felt as though “Franz had pried open the door of their privacy.” (Kundera 124) Once this happened, Franz could have gone back to his wife and lived another lie while pretending he loved her, but he knew he wouldn’t be happy. He then made the best of the situation and found a house by himself, became a professor, and lived contently.
The comparison I would like to prove is the sequence in which both situations happened. First part of the sequence comes from Jackie and Franz both building up the courage to make the confessions. Jackie was extremely scared to make his confession because of the thought of going to hell. This took him a lot of courage to go and make that confession. This is similar to the courage it took for Franz to confess his second lover to his wife. He, like Jackie, was scared of a bad consequence, and this was his wife hurting herself. The second part of the sequence comes from the set down, or “the fall.” When Franz finally confessed to his wife, he found that Sabina had packed up and left town forever. This is similar to Jackie and when he went to the confession booth, messed up, and made the priest send him to the back of the line. Both situations were very big let downs for the two of them. The third similarity to their sequences is overcoming their let downs. When Jackie was sent to the back of the line he could have gave up, but her didn’t. He went back into the booth and ended up making his confession very good. This is similar to Franz because Franz could have easily gone back to his wife and lived the lie, but he decided to move out and start a new life as a professor and became content. Both of them ended up reaching their goals and living joyously.
Franz and Jackie are two very different characters. Some people probably would find no similarities between the two of them at all, but that is the beauty of literature. When you have stories to go along with characters, you can still find similarities between them. In this case it was by the sequence that they came about reaching their goals. They both faced a life changing confession, got set back while doing so, but overcame that setback and reached their goal happily.

Works Cited
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York City, New York: Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1984.
O'Conner, Frank. "First Confession." Roberts, Eger V. Writing About Literature. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006. 233-238.

Sonia Perez
Dr. Lee Hobbs
Academic Writing 2 Eng122 CA16
31 March 2009

Unexpected Love

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and “The Bear” by Anton
Chekhov, the authors develop the theme,unexpected love, throughout the stories. Kundera writes about Tomas and Tereza and Chekhov writes about Mrs. Popov and Smirnov. The characters and the situations they go through show how love can occur unexpectedly. Tomas and Smirnov from each work has had some bad experiences with women, but they have different reactions.
Each author addresses the obstacles that the characters face because they have fallen in
love. One character that Kundera writes about is Tomas, who is a doctor and is divorced from
his first wife. Because of the divorce, Tomas is afraid of women but still desires them, and he
has many mistresses. On the other hand, in “The Bear”, Smirnov hates women, but he too had many women. In the beginning, he just uses the women, and when he starts to fall in love with them, the women cheat on him. So Smirnov hates them and wants nothing to do with women in the past. Both of these characters has faced rejection by women, but they have different reactions to them.

In both of these works, the characters fall in love unexpectantly. Tereza and Tomas meet at the restaurant where Tereza is a waitress. She leaves Prague and goes to Tomas’s flat. “They made love the day she arrived. That night she came down with a fever and stayed a whole week in his flat with the flu” (Kundera 6). Tomas is cautious of Tereza since no woman stays in his flat, and he takes care of her. During this time, Tomas had compassion for Tereza, which turn into love and he does not know if he wants her in his life. In contrast, Chekhov’s characters meet because Mrs. Popov’s deceased husband owes money to Smirnov. Smirnov is rude to Mrs. Popov since he does not want any woman into his life. They get into a heated discussion in which Mrs. Popov insults him. He challenges her to a duel, and she accepts and gets the pistols. “…she accepted my challenge! To tell the truth, it was the first time in my life I’ve seen a woman like that…” (Chekhov 267). Since Mrs. Popov shows that she is not like the other women it leads to Smirnov to fall in love with her. All of the characters fall in love because of a situation, yet their situations are different. Because of Tomas and Smirnov are
rejected by women, they had different situations of how they fall in love. The Unbearable Lightness of Being and “The Bear” are two works in which one of the themes is unexpected love. Tomas and Smirnov’s experiences, it is difficult for these two characters to fall in love. Chekhov and Kundera have some general ideas about unexpected love and many of their ideas are the same. Yet, both authors had different ideas about situations that bring love to people and people to love.
Works Citied
Chekhov, Anton. “The Bear”. Writing About Literature by Edgar V. Roberts. Brief 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2006. 261-69.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008. 6-12.

John Winans
Eng 122
Dr. Hobbs
26March2009
Born to be Lucky, or not
It was at banquet in London in honor of one of the two or three conspicuously illustrious English military names of this generation. (Twain, 242) It is in this starting line of the story Luck by Mark Twain that introduces the idea of naming some prestigious characters and their comparisons. A certain Lieutenant-General Lord Arthur Scoresby, a name that has been thrown around several thousand times in the life of the narrator to date is a major interest and honorary member of the banquet. Unlike Thomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera who worked hard to earn a name for himself and having to protect his birth name was a complicated soul. One fell into situations governed by luck as an outcome and the other was just lucky to fall into certain situations. Both were human and had purpose.
In the military, on the field of battle, sons, fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, linked by the maleness that they were born with yet affiliated by the uniforms they wore. In the wisdom of the reverend, in Luck, the hero is a fool, a secret revealed just in time for honorary mention. The narrator explains: “This verdict was a great surprise to me. If its subject had been Napoleon, or Socrates, or Solomon, my astonishment could not have been greater. (Twain, 243) To be mentioned with great names in history such as these would be more than the average man could endear. Even Caesar would be proud, but these names lived up to them with the acts of heroism committed on behalf of others, whereas the honored banquet guest was at the right place at the right time, chalk it up to luck.
Thomas on the other hand lives by the “Es muss sein” motif of Beethoven. To interpret this would mean “it must be”, a motif Thomas was destined to stick with. Then again, the metaphysical thesis of Parmenides’ philosophy would have it positive going to negative not light going to heavy. “It is my feeling that Thomas had long been secretly irritated by the stern, aggressive, solemn “Es muss sein!” and that he harbored a deep desire to follow the spirit of Parmenides and make heavy go to light.”(Kundera, 210). Thomas had something to prove, he had something to live for something that had to be said, he used his profession as his means to do this, his name to say what had to be said, he did what had to be done. He worked with the human body as a doctor and even studied the brain, this led him to the individualities between not only men and women but among humans and the decisions that affects life.
Scoresby could not tell the truth, Thomas could not lie. “The “tell the truth!” imperative drummed into us by our mamas and papas functions so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman during an interrogation.” (Kundera, 201). Ultimately, a lie will be confronted with the truth and others will know the true self. As for Thomas and Scoresby, they’re peers may be persuaded to believe what they hear and see but the inner self, the “I”, will be revealed within time, after all in the words of Beethoven, “Es muss sein”.

Works Cited
Twain, Mark. “Luck”. Edgar V. Roberts. Writing About Literature. Brief 11th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2005. 242-45.
Kundera, Milan. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” First Olive Edition, 2008 New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd St., New York, N.Y. 10022. Olive Editions, 2008.

Brittany Thunberg
Dr. Hobbs
Academic Writing II CA16
29 March 2009
“The story of an Hour” vs. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Short story “The Story of an Hour” written by Kate Chopin, and novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera are two works that differ greatly. Each work is written in its own unique way and holds its own special characters and plot line as well. However one aspect that seems to stand out as being similar between these two works is their protagonist. The main character in both of these stories is a woman who is in an unhappy marriage.
Mrs. Mallard is the protagonist in “The Story of an Hour.” One of the main conflicts within this short story is the fact that Mrs. Mallard finds out her husband has been killed in a tragic accident. “She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” (Chopin 205) The reader would assume that Mrs. Mallard would be distraught about her husband’s death but she is in fact overjoyed with the fact that her husband has passed. At this point in this short story the reader can assume that Mrs. Mallard is in an unhappy marriage. The fact that Mrs. Mallard is happy that her husband is dead, sends up a red flag to reader’s that her reaction is not normal and she must be suffering in an unhappy marriage.
In the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of the main characters named Tereza is in an unhappy marriage as well. Tereza is faced with the problem of infidelity throughout almost her entire marriage. “Each time he lay down next to his wife in that bed he thought of his mistress.” (Kundera 88) Although Tereza is aware of her husband’s infidelities committed against her, she stays in the marriage anyway. Tereza, although aware that her husband is cheating on her, stays within the marriage because she wants keep her husband close to her out of fear. The reader can sense Tereza’s love for her husband even through hard times.
Mrs. Mallard and Tereza have similarities; they also have differences as well. Although they are both clearly in unhappy marriages the way that they feel toward their husbands are different. Although Tereza is angered by her husband’s infidelities she never seems to readers that she hates her husband. Although readers can tell that Tereza is unhappy, she never wishes harm against her husband Tomas, and she always shows him respect. This is different from Mrs. Mallard because her hatred for her husband is apparent to readers when she is not fazed in the least by her husband’s death but instead strangely excited. “She was drinking in a very elixer of life through that open window.” (Chopin 206) The protagonist in each work is in an extremely similar situation, however their feelings toward their situations as well as their actions convey to reader’s their significant differences in personality.

Works Cited

Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.”Writing about Literature by Edgar V. Roberts. Brief 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson 2006. 205-06.)
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2008.

Chris Collier
Academic Writing II CA 16
Dr. Hobbs
March 25, 2009
The Similarities and differences of Eddie and Tomas; Two Primary Male Characters of Two Works of Literature
There are many differences between Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love”. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a novel, and “Fool for Love” is a drama for example. Kundera’s novel is set in Eastern Europe, while Shepard’s play is set in the Western U.S. The cultural backgrounds of both works vastly differ accordingly due to their locations as well. Yet apart from these superficial differences, Shepard’s Eddie, and Kundera’s Tomas share one strong similarity: their twisted sense of romantic loyalty.
In Kundera’s novel, Tomas sleeps with over one-hundred women. In Sam Shepard’s play, Eddie sleeps with one or more women, however at their core they both love the women they are involved with romantically. To each man, being loyal is not a physical bond or obligation, but a deeper more mental and emotional connection and linkage. Eddie and Tomas both were separated from the woman they love at one point or other in the story, yet both of them either returned to or ventured to find the woman he loved. Both of these men’s definition of loyalty is quite different than the women they love. May and Tereza have more of the traditional sense, while Eddie and Tomas see loyalty as being there for a woman, not neccasarily being monogamous.
The differences only become apparent in either man’s thinking when it becomes apparent the actual necessity of the women in their lives. Eddie is always abandoning May, leaving her to fend for herself. He only seems to want May when he needs her, not when she needs him, but that is only an aspect of his twisted loyalty. Eddie’s loyalty is more that of a prisoner to his own lust than to love. Tomas on the other hand, needs Tereza because he is insecure. He needs Tereza to be around him, to make a certain part of his personality and mind be complete, he also feels sorry for Tereza at some point or other throughout the book. His loyalty though, could also be seen from a prisoner’s perspective, that he is chained to her weak emotions and personality.
While each of the men’s reasons for being loyal may be different, their definitions of loyalty are very much the same. Each man has a sense that he should be with the woman he loves. Although this sense of love does not include the same passion that they feel for other women, as said before, their definition of love depends on the feelings and emotions they have for the women. The bond and the link that they cannot escape, much like a prisoner, and finally the idea that they are allowed to have physical relations with other women so long that the one they love remains there for them.