FRED MISURELLA
97
need for honesty in life, and Edward's brother says that no matter
what else might be said of him, he always says what he thinks to
anyone . Edward argues against this frankness with an analogy: Sup–
pose you meet an irrational person on the street and he starts a
conversation :
If
you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only
what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conver–
sation with a madman and you yourself would become mad.
And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us . .. . I,
you see,
must
lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and
become one of them myself.
At the end of the story an older, even more disillusioned Ed–
ward begins, like a character from Dostoevsky, to long for God . But
Kundera's narrator says, "God is essence itself, whereas Edward had
never found ... anything essential in his thoughts . .. . Ah, ladies
and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything
or anyone seriously."
In his cynicism, in his defense of the need for fiction in a God–
less world inhabited by madmen, Edward states Milan Kundera's
quintessential theme: reason, intelligence, and the clarity of the
West European mind are out of place in this insane world .
Milan Kundera has written, "A man knows he is mortal, but he
takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life."
However, for him and other Central Europeans recent history has
thrown even that sense of national immortality into doubt . Kundera
compares Lithuanians and Ukranians to American Indians, saying
they are kept on what amount to Soviet reservations while their
lands, their cultures, their basic means of survival are destroyed . He
sees this situation as a possible model for the future of nations like
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, as long as they are under
Russian domination. According to Kundera, the Soviet Union will
allow the Central European states to keep their languages and folk–
lores, but their arts and philosophies will suffer a slow, persistent im–
poverishment as their populations are reduced to the Russian image.
While deploring the inhumanity and irrationality of the process,
Kundera does not have much hope . He thinks that the onslaught of
the European culture in Africa and the Americas must have seemed
equally irrational to native populations.
"It
is what is called Progress,"
