The Heterodiegetic Narrator in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Vaibhav Daksha College

Does the Animal Farm narrated by Napoleon or Snowball would have been interpreted the same, or for that matter, Tomas’s narration or Tereza’s narration of The Unbearable Lightness of Being would have maintained the deliverance of equivalent coherency? These rhetorical exercises confidently reply in negative, as possibly any reader of these texts would agree. Varied interpretation of text comes with varied narration, change of the narrator changes the dynamics of myriad factors which structure the narrative and these factors vary for every single narrator, on which so ever plane that narrator is situated or howsoever he is involved in the narrative. Abbott underscores the importance- “But the subject of narration, and particularly of the narrator, is so central to problems in the interpretation of narrative…”(Abbott 62-75). On the part of the author mere choosing a particular narrator set at freedom few outlooks as well as limits certain possibilities. Similarly, the narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, situated outside of the story, a heterodiegetic narrator who doesn’t have any part in the story, ascertains the course of the story different from what would have been in otherwise scenario.

Heterodiegetic narrators...