Exceptional Stories About Ordinary People: The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Anna Karenina

According to Thomas Hardy, "A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling; it must have something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman." With this quote, Thomas Hardy implied that an average story should not be told, that a story must be extraordinary to validate its own telling and it must have elements that are more spectacular than the daily experiences of average people. It is true that a story must have something special to relate to its reader, but a good story does not have to rely on extraordinary experiences from extraordinary people.

Sometimes, ordinary experiences as they're experienced by intelligent and/ or interesting people are exceptional enough. For example, two wonderful works of literature, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, both feature protagonists whose lives are not out of the realm of ordinary experiences, but it is their interpretations and reactions to these experiences that make the stories exceptional enough to be told.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being the protagonist, Tomas, is a famous surgeon and he belongs to the Czech intellectual class. Tomas is stripped of his career because he refuses to renounce an anti-Czech Communist article he wrote. After losing the privilege of practicing medicine, Tomas becomes first a window washer and then a farmer.

It seems that ideally, Tomas would like to wash himself clear of society in order to do as he pleases. Tomas is characterized as an intellectual, a thinker whose pragmatism, experience, and individualism make him unwilling to identify himself as a political liberal or as a faithful husband. His persona does not go through radical astonishing changes and nowhere in the narrative is he faced with bizarre circumstances that ring untrue to the reader. There're many people existing in the real world who can be dubbed "Tomas>"

Lightness versus weight as well as an analysis of human love are two of the major themes of the novel. The lightness is the denial of an ultimate point of life and the acceptance / embracement of the moment. Tomas, practices lightness in his life, but though he does not ultimately change in the end, he does gain some weight. His love for Tereza is at once a blessing and a source of unending conflict. While she often proves to be a burden to his strong individualism and the privacy he desires, his compassion will not allow him to wash himself clean of her.

For much of the book, Tomas is trapped between his womanizing ways and his love for his emotionally needy wife. This theme of lightness versus heaviness and the conflict of love, clearly illustrate that the characters in the novel are very human. They possess neither special powers that are unbeknown to the average person, nor incredible insight that would be outside the realm of an intelligent person. They're simply clever individuals who struggle with society and the impact they have on those they care about, and thus, themselves.

The love between Tomas and Tereza is not extraordinary and the conflicts arising out this love can be applied to many real-life situations. Anna Karenina the protagonist also does not lead an extraordinary existence. Anna Karenina is an intelligent, charming and beautiful woman who is not unhappy with her mundane existence, yet she sees something that she wants more. Anna Karenina is characterized by her inner passions and obsessions which are brought out by her relationship with Count Vronsky. Her love for Vronsky drives her to unimaginable heights to keep her life and mental state at a safe level.

The setting of the novel is extremely important as it is the foundation of the characters reactions to the chain of events taking place in the novel. Had the setting been different, Anna's life might have ended up differently, but since Anna Karenina takes place in conservative Anna has high prices to pay for her choices. As a woman, Anna suffers great injustices for her actions. These unfair laws of society take a part in driving her to her grave.

Love is a major theme in Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina develops a strong obsession with Vronsky, and she is extremely emotionally needy. Since being abandoned by her former friends, she finds herself condemned to a life of loneliness and has nothing to fall back on for peace of mind other than Vronsky's love for her. But even Vronsky's t love isn't enough for her. After everything that has transpired, nothing and no one could satisfy Anna's emotional needs. After a particularly bitter argument with Vronsky, she takes her life.

Anna Karenina and The Unbearable Lightness of Being are realistic narratives that could be classified as love stories, and both novels often question an individual's obligation to their significant others. The settings for both novels bear an importance on the final destination of their protagonists. Both novels feature characters that go through the process of life much like any average person does.

They love, they question, sometimes they learn and sometimes they prevail, but in no way are they different from you and me. These characters are faced with daily situations that often become trials of strength of character, the choices these characters make often deeply affect their lives, much like the choices regular people have to make in their lives, choices that can alter the course of the rest of their lives.

In conclusion, neither the stories told, nor their characters were extraordinary, but they were worth telling because of the way they were told; because the authors of these novels offered to the reader, a beautifully crafted work of literature, a mastery of language, a new perspective, an insight that might not have come directly without the access to these works of literature.