Analysis Of The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera
development of science and technology.
As a novelist Kundera states that the founder of Modern Europe is Cervantes the author of Don Quixote.
The European novelists focus on various themes. With Cervantes it was adventure. With Balzac it was man’s rootedness in History. With Flaubert it was the incognita of the day. With Tolstoy it was intrusions into the irrationality of human behavior.
The theme of the European Novel lay in the passion to know that is the concrete character of life.
The novel began to have an own phases of life which was renegade with Nietzsche’s theme: Death of God. With Cervantes, truth became baptized as a dead fossil and there emerged a plethora of truths; the character became an imaginary self. The knowledge of good and evil attains a relativistic character, one of ambiguity. Kundera quotes Kafka’s novel, The Trial where an innocent man K becomes the victim of an unjust court.
Don Quixote is a novel where time exits as a juxtaposition between magic and reality. The perspective of time changes when History enters into the realm of being. With the coming of Balzac, the institutions of the society like money, crime, police and law and order enter as epic proportions in the novel.
The modern novel is a paradox where characters are flavored with disaster, yet there’s the triumph of character.
Even though Modern Europe characterizes the rise of rationality-the identity of the self breaks apart. Europe is entangled in the horror of war. Destiny, purposelessness and angst catches on to the character’s life. Values break down. There is as great deal of intolerance and fanaticism.
The novel becomes a paradoxical enterprise. The author comments on the death of the Novel by the Dadaists and the surrealists. He paints a bleak picture of the novel in communist totalitarian societies. The novel durin