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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Rhetorical Analysis

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I am analyzing The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Kundera used many objects to symbolize things in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of them being what Kundera calls shit. Kundera used shit to represent things such as dignity, vulnerability, and individuality. Kundera also uses shit to bring up moral questions. We can see an example of this when Kundera tells us about Stalin’s son, Yakov. Kundera used shit to show us how strong a person’s dignity could be and how humans desire to not be like other humans. Kundera tells us a story about Stalin’s son dying because of a dispute over shit, but to Yakov, shit represented Yakov’s dignity. Yakov was imprisoned by the Germans 1941 when he was on the front lines fighting for …show more content…

Shit represents the vulnerability of humans, for example, humans will shield themselves away from everyone else when they need to void their bowels. Humans view defecation as something that’s shameful, and if someone saw you void your bowels, you would lose a bit of your dignity since being seen as vulnerable is embarrassing. This relates back to the previous paragraph about Sabina and her desire to void her bowels in front of Tomas. But in her case, Sabina wants to be embarrassed and wants to be seen as shameful. According to Kundera, the toilet was designed specifically to “make the body forget how paltry it is.” As Tereza squatted over the toilet after having intercourse with the engineer, all she could feel was how utterly humiliated she was, but she was not embarrassed about having intercourse with the engineer. Tereza was embarrassed that she suddenly had the desire to void her bowels. She remembered how her mother said the body “was good for nothing but digesting and excreting.” Tereza hated the way her mother thought about bodies since that would put her in the same box as everyone else. Tereza hated how her mother would walk around their home naked, getting upset at Tereza when she locked the bathroom door while she took her shower because her stepdad insisted on being in the room while she took a shower. This paragraph shows that humans deny shit for individuality and their

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