The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The narrator is the single consistent voice that appears throughout The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. He deliberately makes his presence felt across the stories, actively linking them together across separate narratives and lives. In his own words, the narrator is building “a novel in the form of variations” (227), with each variation of Czechoslovakian existence showing the similarities and shared humanity of seemingly different people. Though the narrator has a connection with all his characters, Tamina emerges as his principal focus. Even in narrating her story, however, he draws attention to his own existence and perspective. The narrator of this novel forgoes the detached, omniscient voice of literary convention. Instead, he is a first-person presence in the stories, as shown when he describes Tamina’s story through his own perspective: “I see Tamina standing in the middle of the dormitory” (253). His self-conscious narration deliberately draws attention to itself, and it highlights the novel’s Postmodernist style, where narration itself becomes part of the subject matter. The narrator weaves together the characters, unifying their disparate stories into a single collection. At the same time, he also expands this frame outward: toward himself, toward the audience, and toward the history of the Czechoslovakian people.

In the novel, the state edits photographs and erases history, while characters strain to recall the contours of a face. This brings up the question of whether the narrator is reliable if he cannot fully master his own remembering. He describes exile as the experience of living beside a permanent fault line, a border which he insists “is constantly with us” (297). That is not a position of omniscience but an admission that point of view is impaired by distance and time. In this sense, the narrator resembles the state: If the “only immortality is in the police files” (120), then his self-aware narration becomes a parallel archive as a way to preserve memories and lives for posterity in a way that is free of state control. The narrator admits to subjectivity even as he insists on bearing witness. 

The narrator’s candor complicates his role as these records contain  confessions of his immorality. When shifting into his own story, for example, the narrator confesses he felt “a wild desire to rape [his friend]” (105). Yet because he exposes the thought rather than smuggling it under euphemism, the very act of disclosure becomes a kind of negative warranty. Add to this his own metanarrative caveat about craft, when he notes he breaks “all the rules of perspective” (109) by naming Prague but anonymizing the provincial town, illustrates the extent to which the narrator is more than a mere narrator. Freed from convention and rules, yet bound by a desire to confess and humanize, the narrator becomes a character in his own right.

Biographical similarities blur the lines between the narrator and the author, Milan Kundera. The narrator states his own name is Milan Kundera, and he inserts Kundera’s father’s aphasia into the book’s narrative. He says that “the silence of [his] father […] forms the background of the picture [he is] painting of Tamina” (221), so the private grief of the author is inextricably placed within the broader, more public grief of the novel. Yet the text maintains a gap between the author and the narrator, which is bolstered by the apparent unreliability of the narrator. In a novel about forgetting, the narrator describes how time and distance can affect his own memory. These memories from long ago in the narrator’s life may be falling victim to the same process of erasure. For the narrator, however, the distance between fiction and reality is a shield against vulnerability. The “I” is Kundera’s instrument for answering his own forgetting, but because it is declared as instrument, it is less a mask than a method. The result is a narrator who is not reliable in the journalistic sense and does not pretend to be, but one who nevertheless strives toward a constant sense of authenticity.

The narrator begins Mirek’s story with an anecdote about political erasure. From then on, Mirek’s quest to reclaim his “compromising papers” functions as a parable of the very politics he resists. His journey is motivated by the absurd, as his greatest fear is that people will know that he had an affair with an “ugly” woman. What terrifies him is not only the state’s dossier but the social afterlife of any trace, since he knows documents create leverage. When he returns home after trying to outmaneuver a tail, the officials are already inside with a warrant, “making a list” of what they seized from his home (32). Mirek’s absurd quest to stop people from knowing that he once had a relationship with a woman he now deems unattractive ends with the state making a list of everything that is seized from his home, creating an archive of Mirek’s mistakes that is a far more pressing concern for him than whatever social slight might result from people knowing about Zdena. In a world of censorship, erasure, and compromising papers, Mirek’s anxiety about being able to define his own status and sense of self becomes the source of his problems.

Mirek’s itinerary through Prague is also a choreography of memory and forgetting. He drives, doubles back, and changes routes. Pausing in front of the station house where Zdena once lived, he is pierced by the memory of Zdena and her large nose, which fills Mirek with a sense of “immense love.” The journey itself is an act of remembrance that leads Mirek to an emotional point in his past that has become obscured amid his social anxiety. Moments later, however, this same journey becomes an act of forgetting, as he “immediately wiped [the memory] from his mind” (31). This oscillation between recollection and erasure mirrors the surveillance car that follows him and serves as a reminder that forgetting is both an internal impulse and an external imposition. The journey is Mirek’s effort to make the ephemeral stand still—to trap memories and carry them away like contraband, but the narrative refuses Mirek the control he wants. His memories fade the moment he pulls away from Zdena’s house, and his desire to edit his memories echo the state, collapsing the distinction between victim and perpetrator. 

When the police search Mirek’s home and confiscate his papers, the narrator widens the frame to highlight that this is how an entire demographic vanished: The Czech people who disappeared include those whom the state forced into exile and those who, through fear of state violence, have been forced into silence amid this “splendidly illuminated scene of history” (33). Mirek has fantasized about this very ending, “drawn irresistibly to the idea of prison” (33), believing this is the only archive that can guarantee his story will not be quietly erased. The irony is sharp, since he resists erasure by delivering himself to the state’s records. His story dramatizes how both personal vanity and political power can enact forgetting; however, neither is fully successful. The novel’s counterforce is narration itself, which restores Zdena to the picture and refuses both Mirek’s deletion and the state’s monopoly.