ISSN-L: 2223-9553, ISSN: 2223-9944

Academic Research International Vol. 3, No. 1, July 2012

NARRATION IN MILAN KUNDERA’S THE JOKE

Mohsen Masoomi
Department of English,
Sanandaj Branch,
Islamic Azad University,
IRAN.
mmasoomi@iausdj.ac.ir

ABSTRACT
Many reviewers and critics have noticeably referred to various techniques of multiple
narration and polyphonic composition as major structural devices in The Joke. It is believed
that Milan Kundera, on one hand uses the technique multiple narration to implement his major
themes, and on the other hand, inserts the polyphony of music into the realm of his novel. As a
matter of fact, for Kundera the narrative structure of The Joke resembles much to that of a
musical note. While each note contains uniqueness on its own, it combines and accords with
other notes to produce a coherent whole. Kundera gives unity and consistency to his novel
through implementing a web of individual yet interconnected narrators/characters that best
perform their duties in both narration and presentation. This multi-perspectival narrative style
helps the writer to put in the picture the intended themes of the story through a polyphonic
narrative.
Keywords: multiple narrations, polyphony, characterization, Milan Kundera

GENERAL OVERVIEW AND STRUCTURE

Milan Kundera’s debut novel The Joke (Žert) was written in 1965 in seven parts and was first
published in 1967 in Czechoslovakia. Its final revised English edition was prepared by the author
himself and Aaron Asher and published by HarperCollins Publishers in 1992. Much of the narrative of
The Joke consists of flashbacks which date back to early 1950s in Czechoslovakia. The action of the
novel centers on the story of Ludvik, the protagonist, who comes from a small town in southern
Moravia and who becomes a fervent political activist during his university days in Prague. He tells
how the joke of the title – a postcard (Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere
stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!) to a naïve yet exasperatingly patriotic girlfriend, named
Marketa, whom he was trying to impress – leads to his expulsion from the party and university, army
service among the politically unwanted and several years in the mines of Ostrava, where he also
experiences a tragic love affair with Lucie. Later Ludvik plans to revenge on Pavel Zemanek, his
former party comrade who played a crucial role on his ill-fated life. Ludvik tries to seduce Zemanek’s
wife, Helena, during her visit to Moravia as a radio reporter. But this turns out to be another joke on
Ludvik himself, since he learns that Zemanek himself wants to get rid of Helena. Ludvik succeeds in
his revenge plan, on the surface, but this does not make him victorious; the story ends in Helena’s
suicide attempt and Jaroslav’s heart attack.
The Joke has been variously labeled as realistic, political, ideological, and psychological in genre by
different reviewers. Justifications for such categorizations seem quite equally available. The author’s
outstanding style of narration with its four first-person narrators and their internal monologues, as
Craig Cravens (2000) suggests, are enough evidence to register this multi-perspectival novel as a
psychological one. He believes that “such a narrative method has come to be associated with the type
of novel known as the “psychological novel,” practitioners of which such as Faulkner, Woolf, Beckett
and Joyce, often employ multiple perspectives to assert the subjective nature of experience and thus
display human consciousness as isolated, unique and idiosyncratic.” However, these techniques of
multiple narration, polyphonic composition and fascination with numbers (especially number 7) are
what most readers and reviewers have noticeably lingered upon as structural devices in this novel. As
Peter Kussi (2003) relates it, “Kundera uses the technique of multiple narrations as a structural way to

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question his themes. He asserts that by cross-examining the accounts of the story furnished by four
narrators, Kundera the skeptic exposed their overlapping delusions and tried to show that each man
has his own falsehood.

DISCUSSION
While expanding a discussion on the art of composition, in part four of The Art of the Novel, Kundera
again elaborates more on his novels’ structure. Here, while from one side he characterizes the
similarities of music and novel, the reader, on the other side, becomes more acquainted with terms
such as polyphony and unilinear compositions. He further asserts that “polyphony in music is the
simultaneous presentation of two or more voices (melodic lines) that are perfectly bound together but
still keep their relative independence” (Kundera, 1986).
As an important principle of composition, polyphony plays a vital role in Milan Kundera’s narratives
especially in The Joke. Structurally, as in music, Kundera brings the “simultaneous presentation of two
or more voices (melodic lines)” into the novel’s realm. Here he tries to avoid unilinear composition or
the continuous narration of the story of Ludvik’s fate, “in favor of a structure, in which a multiplicity
of lines meet and enter into a “contrapuntal” relation in which none can be called primary or
secondary, subsidiary or dominant, but in which all enjoy the same status, the same relative autonomy,
and are all equally necessary to one another and to the harmony and significance of the group”
(Ricard, 2003).
The base time of The Joke covers three days in the mid-1960s in Czechoslovakia. The story introduces
four distinct carefully selected narrators, one female and three males amongst which Ludvik Jahn is
the chief one. It is through these interwoven first-person narratives that we receive the same events and
characters treated from several points of view. Each voice is stylistically distinct; together, they make
up a lucid and satisfying whole. As Kundera himself explains: “Ludvik’s monologue take up 2/3 of the
book; the monologues of the other three together take up 1/3 (Jaroslav 1/6, Kostka 1/9, Helena 1/18).
That mathematical structure determines what I would call the lighting of the characters. Ludvik stands
in full light, illuminated from inside (by his own monologue) and from outside (the other monologues
all sketch his portrait). Jaroslav fills a sixth of the book with his monologue and his self-portrait is
corrected from the outside by Ludvik’s monologue. And so on. Each character is lighted at a different
intensity and in a different way. Lucie, who is one of the most important characters, has no monologue
of her own; she is lighted only from the outside by Ludvik’s and Kostka’s. The absence of interior
lighting gives her a mysterious, elusive quality. She stands, so to speak, behind glass; she cannot be
touched” (Kundera, 1986). Lucie remains the mysterious woman, the soul and engine of the novel,
even though she disappears for most of the novel. Milan Kundera doesn’t give Lucie the role of a
narrator. Instead, every other part of the story including characters’ lives in the past, takes the shape of
a retrospective narrative, which together with that three-day action of the story are all conveyed to the
readers through the intermingled monologues of only four of characters: Ludvik, Helena, Jaroslav and
Kostka.
This variety of narrators has magnified the beauties of the novel from an aesthetic point of view,
though inciting some questions as well. “The fundamental problem of the narrative structure of The
Joke consists in the selection of the narrators” (Dolezel, 1999). He further adds, “Why were these
characters and not any of the others entrusted with the function of narrating? The selection of narrators
was not fortuitous but determined, I believe, by the structure and type of Kundera’s novel.
Typologically, The Joke can be designated an ideological novel (novel of ideas), i.e. a novel
dominated in its structure by the plane of ideas. The narrators of The Joke are representatives of
various systems of “false” ideologies-myths; their narrative monologues are authentic accounts of the
social conditions and of the individual directions of the destruction of myths” (Dolezel, 1999).
Following the technique of shifting perspectives, then different portions of The Joke are presented in
different narrative modes and/or perspectives in order to produce a heterogeneous text, which includes
“formally differentiated narrative segments” (Dolezel, 1999). Each narrative segment in The Joke is
presented through shifting points of view and the alternation of narrative forms which then make the
novel a multi-perspective one. In this technique readers are not confined to a single constant
perspective of one narrator in the story. On the other hand, the moment readers come to know Ludvik,
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Helena, Jaroslav and Kostka, they begin to experience both objective and subjective narrative forms
with a lively rhythm and of course with a wide range of interpretations and meanings for the narrated
events.
A great part of the accomplishment of The Joke, as a multi-perspective novel, goes to the practice of
both cyclic structure and linear structure (Dolezel, 1999) in its narrative design. As a good example of
cyclic structure we may refer to the descriptions given about the first encounter of Helena and Ludvik
and their relationship through Ludvik’s point of view in section 2 of part five and Helena’s point of
view in section 3 of part two. Besides this distinctive structural design in the narration, critics have
analyzed narrative techniques of the novel in terms of two other levels of evaluation. At one level, two
experiential centers of narrating and experiencing selves throughout the first-person narrations in the
text are distinguished: “[…] the experiencing self narrates as one undergoing events. It has no
temporal distance from the events related and hence no perspective different from that of the other
characters of the story. At this pole of the first-person mode, characters and events occupy the reader’s
attention almost completely. The narrating self, on the other hand, narrates from a later point in time
and in most respects resemble a third-person narrator. It has the advantage of retrospectivity and may,
if it chooses, anticipate or even suppress its acquired knowledge. It may also draw attention to itself at
the moment of narration. The reader divides his attention between these two spatio-temporal realms
and the narrational center of gravity oscillates between them” (Cravens, 2000).
At another level, the special features in the organization and style of the narrative monologues uttered
by particular characters are reminded: “[…] the specific features of the particular narrative
monologues reflect various stages of the myth-destroying process which the narrators have reached.
Specifically, the structure and texture of the narrative monologue depends on the balance of two
functions of narrator, namely the representational and the interpretative function. We assume that the
balance of representation and interpretation, different in the particular narrative monologues of The
Joke, reflects the narrator’s stage in the myth-destroying process” (Dolezel, 1999).
According to Dolezel’s appraisal, then, in Helena’s narrative interpretation dominates over
representation, in Kostka’s narrative it is the same status but “Jaroslav’s monologue is built on a
parallelism of representation and interpretation. It presents narrated events on two parallel and
disjointed levels, that of folkloristic myth and that of everyday life.” And rightly enough, Ludvik’s
monologue plays a vital role in the narrative symposium of The Joke: “His monologue dominates the
narrative structure of the novel not only because it introduces the most important episodes of the
action, but also because it presents the most profound and most conscious destruction of the myth.
Mythological interpretation is replaced by critical analysis; a perfect harmony between the narrator’s
representational “responsibility” and his interpretative function is thus achieved” (Dolezel, 1999).
However, whether it is interpretation or representation, and whether it is narrating or experiencing, we
can still clearly observe “the doubling or multiplication of narrative voices” which provides “the
material of polyphonic composition” (Ricard, 2003). Accordingly this polyphonic composition
manifests itself in the presence of four points of view and, as the author decides, four first-person
narrators in the novel. Unlike some other novels using the same technique, here the author doesn’t stay
with the same narrator for the whole story – even if it is Ludvik Jahn as the protagonist. In this way we
come to know characters who gain their own voice and their own role as narrators while presenting
their life story to the readers. On one hand their presentations and comprehensions of the events vary
(just to assert the idea of individual existence of each narrator and also to show the relativity of their
viewpoints), and on the other hand, in a complementary design, these individual voices come together
to “to combine into a chord” in the same way as Ludvik comments on the Ride of the Kings, and to
complete and elucidate other narrators’ accounts. Thus Ludvik’s status as a narrator becomes
important only as far as quantitative or dramatic measures of the action of the story are concerned.
Ludvik narrates the bulk of the story since it is his own, but the “voices” in the novel are still equal
(Ricard, 2003).
As it is quite competently employed by Milan Kundera, Ludvik makes a distinction between his
experiencing and narrating selves while at the same time he shifts between past-tense
narrations/experiences and present-tense philosophical digressions. Ludvik’s tone is more tangible

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during these digressions; his tone seems to be detached and unemotional but this doesn’t mean that he
is not familiar with emotions like hate, resentment or revenge; whenever possible the writer reminds
the readers about these sensations, which are shown in two related dimensions. Once Ludvik Jahn is
facing and experiencing the cruelties done to him by the Communist Party and ruining his life for
fifteen years or at another time-span, when he remembers and narrates those cruelties and injustices
done to him, readers come to know the substance of those deep-seated emotions. At another occasion
we can see Ludvik’s feelings through the eyes of a character foil like Kostka.
But I tell you again for the last time: Look deep into your soul! The deepest motive for your good
deeds is not love, but hatred! Hatred towards those who once hurt you, towards those who raised their
hands against you in that hall! Your soul knows no God, and therefore knows no forgiveness. You
long for retribution. You identify those who hurt you then with those who hurt others now, and you
take your revenge on them. Yes, revenge! You are full of hatred even when you help people”
(Kundera, 1992).
Not surprising, we can contemplate more on the previous lines as the nearest to Ludvik’s personality
since in the very beginning of the book even he himself appreciates Kostka because of his
disagreements with Ludvik: “(I must say that it was our differences that endeared Kostka to me and
made me enjoy our arguments; I used them as a touchstone of who I was and what I thought.)”
Ludvik’s meditative, self-critical style in narrating becomes his trademark. He has a critical distance
on events, and “relates his disasters in a quiet, even tone devoid of self-pity. The experiencing self in
his autobiographical narrative is disciplined by an overarching intelligence that keeps directing the
storytelling toward the pole of analysis” (Banerjee, 1992). But after years of political commotions,
mental and physical tortures and through his social encounters, now he shows more experienced; at
least he becomes convinced that “everything in life that happens to me has a sense beyond itself,
means something.” Ludvik’s investigative mind is considered a precious gift given by Kundera to this
character: “It is much to Kundera’s credit that he does not depict his hero, a dissident intellectual like
himself, as a man with all the answers. Ludvik himself realizes he is doing everything possible to
prevent time form healing his wounds, but hate has crowded out all other emotions from his life. His
awareness of the inadequacy of this position reaches a crescendo in the last scene, when he sees his
childhood friend in the throes of a heart attack (Berman, 1970).
Helena enters in the second part of the novel as another narrator. Her narration gives the readers a sort
of background for Ludvik’s mission and foreshadows future events at the climax of the story, as Fred
Misurella puts it. In Helena’s narration there is no difference in narrated time and time of narration
while she gives the readers a sense of stream-of-consciousness monologue. She has made a utopia out
of Communism for herself; with no firm conviction of life, she is portrayed as a befuddled, shallow
woman who stays infatuated with Communist sloganeering. Through her fragmented enjambing
narration, we come to know about past events like her meeting with and faltering marriage to Pavel
Zemanek. She remembers Pavel’s shocking statement during an argument: “we didn’t marry for love,
we married out of Party discipline,” (Kundera, 1992); nonetheless, with such idealistic thoughts and
feelings of her it takes time to cope with the harsh reality. Helena feels a great gap inside her soul; she
tries to be strong as she consoles herself with a line from Czechoslovak journalist Fucik: “Let sadness
never be linked with my name.” She doesn’t want her “life to split down the middle,” instead she wants
“it to remain whole from beginning to end.” However she can’t find real love; she uses the Communist
Party ideas and power to compensate for all the emptiness felt inside her life. And her naivety doesn’t
let her know about Ludvik’s satanic mission.
As an old school friend of Ludvik, Jaroslav appears as another narrating character at part four of The
Joke. He is a folk music devotee who leads a traditional Moravian folk band. The cultural relationship
between Communist ideology and Czech folk values, musicology (in section four of part four),
personal memories of his own life or Ludvik’s, and some historical accounts are all conveyed to the
readers via Jaroslav’s elevated literary style of narration. He uses first-person point of view in his
narration and sometimes it becomes difficult to make a borderline between his narrating and
experiencing selves, while at the same time “his voice shifts the narrative from bitter irony to a warm
tone of deeply felt nostalgia” (Banerjee, 1992). Jaroslav is hopeful that his son Vladimir plays the role
of king in the folk ritual known as the Ride of the Kings, as he perceives the meaning of his existence
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in it. Unfortunately, Jaroslav is not lucky enough to see Vladimir playing the role of the king.
Vladimir, instead, prefers to go to motorcycle races with Koutecky’s grandson, “a sign that he and
other young Czechs in the story have lost contact with their traditions and lack all memory of (or lack
the wish to have a memory of) the past,” (Misurella, 1993).
Kostka is the fourth narrator in The Joke. He works as a virologist at the local hospital. It was Ludvik
who had helped him to secure the job. Kostka is a Christian who accepts the initiation of Communism
despite the fact that it is “a movement that inscribed godlessness on its shield,” for he saw a support
for working-class and oppressed people in Communism; a pledge for worldwide brotherly love. Both
Ludvik and Kostka had important university positions, one as a student and the other as a lecturer.
Kostka at times expresses his amazement because of the resemblance of their fate. But in fact “yet
beneath this outward alliance lies an abyss of inward disagreement,” as confesses Kostka. Though
Ludvik and Kostka were both expelled out from university because of their independent thinking, their
intellectual status proved to be different. Focusing on this difference, Fred Misurella (1993) points out
that “While Ludvik’s independence lies along cynical, pessimistic lines of reason and doubt (like the
laughter of the Devil in The book of Laughter and Forgetting), Kostka’s is founded on religious,
optimistic ones of faith.”
However, Kostka lends Ludvik his apartment for his plan of seduction or as he discloses it to Kostka
“a beautiful demolition.” Kostka mostly sticks to his narrating self and his narration could be viewed
as a kind of confession; indeed he speaks like a preacher and gives many biblical quotations. It is in a
barbershop recommended by Kostka that Ludvik encounters Lucie, his old love. Both Kostka and
Ludvik have met Lucie during their exile. While Ludvik makes a failure out of his love affair with
Lucie, just later it is Kostka who succeeds in the same battle.
It is in section twenty of part six that Kostka shows a dire turn of attitudes and manners. Up to this
section Kostka claimed to see his destiny in God’s hand and tried to see positive side of every event,
even his sufferings because of the Party and the fate. Then in a collapsing mood he casts a doubt on
everything in this last chapter of part six when he confesses “OH, HOW I DELUDE myself! How
stubbornly I try to convince myself I’ve taken the right path! How I parade the power of my faith
before the unbeliever!” (Kundera, 1992).
There is a different style of narration in the final part of the novel. This part contains nineteen sections
with a meticulous combination of narrators; the three characters alternate in telling the action as odd
chapters are narrated by Ludvik and the even ones are divided between Helena and Jaroslav. The
profusion of narrators, however, results in a greater achievement: a cinematic sequence of cuts, setting
an escalating pace and pulling the reader into the story. No longer are long-past events merely
recounted: things are happening “here and now”. All the main characters arrive finally in the same
place at the same time. In fact, through the narrators’ mingled narrating and experiencing selves we
come to know about Helena’s suicide attempt with laxatives (which makes a comic scene), Jaroslav’s
heart attack (which makes a tragic catharsis) and Ludvik’s status in the aftermath of his revenge while
at same time we see the ritual of the Ride of the Kings is performed. As Fred Misurella (1993) puts it
“by means of this canon Kundera renders simultaneous action from several points of view and
examines the passions of two parts of Ludvik’s life, one before the postcard, the other afterward,
hinting at a resolution for the future that in itself raises doubts, at least for Czechoslovakia.”

CONCLUSION
The narrative structure of The Joke resembles much to that of a musical note for Kundera. While each
note contains a definite individuality on its own, it combines and accords with other notes to produce a
whole. Kundera gives unity and coherence to his masterpiece through implementing a web of
individual yet interrelated narrators/characters that best perform their duties in both narration and
presentation. This multi-perspectival narrative style helps the writer to tell the intended themes of the
story through a polyphonic narrative, while adds much to the characterization process throughout the
novel.

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REFERENCES
Banerjee, M. N. (1992). Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera. New York: Grove
Weidenfeld Press.
Berman, M. (1970). “To Ludvik, Optimism Was the Opium of the People,” Review of The Joke, The
New York Times. <http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/kundera-joke2.html.>. [22 Jan
2012].
Cravens, C. (2000). “Faulty Consciousness: Milan Kundera’s The Joke,” Slavic and East European
Journal, 44:1. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/309630.>. [23 Aug 2011].
Dolezel, L. (1999). “Narrative Symposium” in Milan Kundera’s The Joke, Critical Essays on Milan
Kundera, ed., Peter Petro. New York: G. K. Hall.
Kundera, M. (1986). The Art of the Novel, translated from the French by Linda Asher. New York:
Grove Press.
Kundera, M. (1992). The Joke, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. (2003 Ed). New
Delhi: Penguin Books India.
Kussi, P. (2003). “Milan Kundera: Dialogues with Fiction,” Bloom’s Modern Critical Views on Milan
Kundera, Ed., Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers.
Masoomi, M. (2010). The Convergence of the Theory and the Text: An Eclectic Approach to
Exploring the Motif of Globality in Mishra and Kundera’s Selected Works. Unpublished PhD Thesis.
India: University of Pune.
Misurella, F. (1993). Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press.
Ricard, F. (2003). Agnes’s Final Afternoon: An Essay on the Works of Milan Kundera, Translated
from the French by Aaron Asher. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

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