The character of Tereza carries the idea of eternal return, she is a ‘continuation of the gesture by which her mother cast off her life,’ she is simply without her mother’s immodesty.
Section 8 of Soul and Body sums up Tereza’s fears, she longs to be someone completely different from the image of her mother’s as she would become ‘occasionally upset at the sight of her mother’s features in her face.’
For Tereza, books act as an ‘imaginary escape’ from reality, they are able to offer her the comfort and the satisfaction away from an ‘unsatisfying’ life. Through her books, she is able to become ‘differentiated … from others.’ Here, Kundera inserts an authorial comment – a dandy’s cane makes him more ‘modern and up to date,’ yet Tereza’s book makes her seem ‘old-fashioned.’ Despite this, they are alike in that they both stand out from a mass amount of bodies. (We – D-503 longs to stand out amongst the mass of ciphers, to discover his soul, oppressed by the One State’s government.)
Her desire to be her own individual results in her love for a man whom she has never met. Tereza falls in love with Tomas simply because ‘neither her mother nor the drunks’ knew. This suggests that she is attempting to be as different as she possibly can from her mother’s image. She longs to find the soul that is buried itself deep inside her body, because only by the emergence of her soul, is she able to discover ‘a body unlike other bodies’ and become ‘lighter.’ (We – D-503’s attraction to I-330)
The meeting of Tereza and Tomas is simply due to chance. It is because of chance that when Tereza first saw Tomas that he is surrounded by all the things that she considers beautiful and satisfying, the books, the music of Beethoven and the cogac.
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