The Eternal Return In Milan Kundera’s Novels

Milan Kunderais well-known to the world for the wise philosophizing in his novels, among which the thought of eternal return is widespread in his middle works although more covert. Kundera mentioned for the first time Niezsche’s"mad myth" of eternal return in the beginning of his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his thought of eternal return, however, is. far earlier. There are two components of the eternal return in Kundera’s novels: Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence as his thinking background and the reincarnation as his novel technique.The first chapter expounds and proves with his novel theory that Milan Kundera attaches great importance to the theme of eternal return and the reincarnation as a novel technique. The second chapter focuses on how Kundera’s own personality traits and novelist identity led him to the thought of eternal return. The third chapter is divided into three parts. The first part turns to discuss the relationship between Kundera’s thought of eternal return and the major theme of his novels from four levels:how Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence works on the ontological assumptions of Kundera’snovels,five fundamental possibility of being in a world where eternal return doesn’t exists, the dead end of being in the world and how Kundera found his way out in his late French trilogy. The second part focuses on the impact of Kundera’s thoughts of eternal return on his novel structure, which comes down to the reclassification of his novels and detailed text analysis on life and death. The third part summarizes the aesthetics of eternal return in Kundera’s novels.In brief, this article tries to analyzethe two layers of eternal return in the novels of Milan Kundera so as to comprehend Kundera’s philosophical thinking in his novels on a more holistic level and to provide a new perspective for exploring Kundera’sinnovation of the art of novel.