Holding the mirror to Kundera: Identities of the 'self'

Contemporary Czech novelist Milan Kundera claims that the specific concern of the novel is the enigma of the self. In his seven novels the puzzle of identity--the search for the self--is a major and unifying theme. In this thesis the identities of three characters are examined against the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, which proposes that the formation of identity has a specific progression initiated by the "mirror stage" and that the constitution of the self ultimately happens in language. The subjectivity of Jaromil in Life is Elsewhere (1974), Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and Agnes in Immortality (1990) is traced out in Lacanian terms. The analysis is patterned after the Lacanian readings of fiction done by James M. Mellard in Using Lacan, Reading Fiction and draws from the Lacanian poetics set forth by Ellie Ragland-Sullivan.