Wednesday

Don't everybody choose the same one! (That looks suspicious). Here are the Part V journal prompts for Friday/Monday:
1. Compare and contrast Tereza’s ideas about the soul (41), Sabina’s ideas about privacy (112-113), and Tomas’s experience with the secret police in Czechoslovakia (Part V). What light does his experience shed on Tereza and Sabina’s desire to find or protect their individuality?
2. See the passage on page 226-228 and focus on the imagery associated with Tereza that implies a comparison with Oedipus. Has Tereza, in some way, married her own mother? Remember Tomas’s letter to the editor, guilt, and “soul and body” to develop your response.
3. Tomas, impelled to be a doctor, becomes a window washer by “an unspoken vow of fidelity.” Fidelity to what? Hasn’t he betrayed himself? Was it his choice?
4. Read V: Chapter 9 and then 221 from “Staring impotently…” to “Let us return to Tomas.” Why is Tomas such a prolific womanizer? Why do you think the author or narrator has made sex into such a prominent metaphor in the novel? Is Tomas a kind of Faust character?
5. Read the last two paragraphs of 206-207. Compare and contrast this passage with the one on Sabina’s views of beauty by mistake (bottom of 101 and top of 102) and Tereza’s in the last paragraph on 78 (which is informed by the narration in 11:51-52).
6. In what ways has metaphor changed Tomas’s life?
7. Compare and contrast Tomas on 200 with Tereza on 41.
8. Explain how “Love is our freedom” (236) and Tomas’s affairs “enslavement” (234) when heretofore he has seemed burdened by compassion for Tereza. Is Tomas’s life looking like Beethoven’s development of “Es muss sein!” – moving from light to serious, from joke to metaphysical truth – or like Parmenides’s development from heavy to light? (195-196)