The narrator tells us that Tereza has a desire to fall, even though she
fears death. In class we decided that she might be desiring death, even though she is not actively
seeking it. We found a few points in her life that might have caused this "desire to fall", however, I believe the main reason is due to the fact that she was not really valued as a child by her mother. Tereza is looking for someone to fill this void in
her life, and I believe that because of this she attaches herself to Tomas.
However, this void is still there and she feels this "lack of worth." Death, she might think, would be light in a sense, but then again it could also be heavy in way. Death might
symbolize the middle ground between light and heavy and it could symbolize
peace, the peace she is looking for to fill the void in her life. Also, since Tereza is so obsessed with her body, she might want to die in
order to get rid of her body (soul body split) wherein she would be separated
from her body. This desire would certainly represent the motif of soul body split in the novel.
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I've come to associate death with Tereza more and more as I've progressed through the story. We determined that all of her dreams incorporate it in one way or another. Some even reduce her to nothing but a body, an empty-shelled automaton with no emotion. With this I can agree that she feels a lack of worth.
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One thing I like about Kundera’s writing is that he redefines words such as “vertigo.” When I think of vertigo, I first think of dizziness associated with the inner-ear dysfunction and next I think of the Alfred Hitchcock film about a cop who’s afraid of heights. I would never have associated vertigo with a desire to fall.
Perhaps her desire to fall is a desire to fall into someone’s arms….someone like Tomas who will stay with her and care for her, or the engineer who will allow her to figure out her emotions that she has for Tomas. But I do think that her desire to fall seems ironic considering she searches for “something higher.” These 2 opposing desires may indicate her body-soul conflict.
I agree that she wants to fill that void and I do think that she thinks death could fill it, but when i think of death it seems like a very heavy thing to me. Teresa is misguided in her idea that death would solve her problems because death is a very final heavy state. You cannot come back from death. To be light you have to be able to move on and forget, but when one is dead no such thing is possible.
I agree that she has a certain desire to die but I don't think its so much to fill a void as to escape the emptiness and pain she experiences in her day to day life. All the characters in the novel seem discontent with their lives, never managing to stay in one place or with one person. I think the desire to fall is a desire to escape all that. Another instance where we see this I believe is when Franz goes on the march and later gets into the fight. In both cases, I think he is deliberately putting himself in a situation where he is likely to die.
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