The Paradoxical World In Ivan Klima's Works

Ivan Klima is a famous Czech writer. Klima, Havel and Kundera are together called the troika in Czech literature. Klima's works are honest, touching, humorous and witty, full of tolerance and understanding of life, also of a happy-go-lucky wisdom, all of which are because he experienced two totalitarianisms. His works show the depressiveness in life and the distortion of humanity, and the unique humanistic spirit of Bohemians-----"withdrawal", which is a realistic humanity, that is compromise and adaptation to the parodoxical world. He developed a new particular style to tell people various love stories with special background: weird, mysterious, tragic, exaggerated and absurd... He was good at discussing people's survival and the relationship between sexes by telling stories about marriage and love, which is also his another expression of the predicament of life. He thought politics only temporarily decided the fate of people, while real life is the tough and long daily life of ordinary people under political masks.Therefore, like many Czech writers, Klima also mainly focused on two subjects: sexual love and politics.He was used to presenting complex life and rich humanity of people by depicting ordinary people's daily life and various trifles. And he used humor to dissolve the "absurdity" of life, and counteract the "parodoxicality"in life. The works of Klima and most other Czech writers are dedicated to answering this question: How could people live on in a society of no freedom? Klima is trying to display such a "Prague Spirit" in his works --live, and bear in mind.Based on six works of Klima and his essays The Spirit of Prague and Hannah Arent's totalitarianism theory, the thesis discusses the paradoxical world in Klima's works, as well as the the peculiar tenacity, retreat, humor of czechs when facing paradoxicality. The thesis is divided into three chapters to explore the paradoxicality in Klima 's works. The first chapter discusses the pain and perplexity of people lost in truths and lies. Life is full of opposite aspects. People are eager to know truths, be trusted and get loyalty between relatives or couples. They search everywhere for them, but get nothing. People must survive even facing this kind of paradoxicality. The second chapter explains people's difficult situation between freedom and imprisonment. No matter whether in the Nazi era or Stalin time, people made great effort to seek freedom, but they could never get rid of the fate of being imprisoned. The third chapter discusses the memory and forgetting in personal life and national survival. Both individuals and the whole nation tried to retain memory when Czechoslovakia was faced with "organized forgetting". People wanted to provide historical truth and retain the nation's memory through writing.