The book explores the every-day chipping away of life.
There are no lofty emotions, no fairy-tale endings everything frays when subjected to daily use. Our lives today may seem to be different from theirs, but really all of us are caught in the same meaningless-meaning given by social constructs, the same moments of lust and other primal feelings, and in the end, we are all ludicrously tragic in our loneliness. It plods through our insignificant lives, especially the lives of men and women caught in an iron-curtained world. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Apparently inspired by the real-life incident where a girl in Czechoslovakia was arrested for stealing flowers from a cemetery (for her lover), The Joke is a strange and sad little book. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Rather, it becomes the realm where the revolutionary history seems to encroach in a most vicious manner on individual existence in order to proclaim its imminence. As Kostka and Ludvik relate in the novel, Lucie seems outside history, unaware of the revolution or Christianity, and she expresses herself mostly through non-verbal, pastoral icons, an “instinctive precursor of language.” However, her constant displacement around the country, the two rape incidents and other mistreatments suggest that Lucie’s peripheral position does not warrant a comforting retreat from the socio-political euphoria. Particularly in the case of Lucie, the author seems to test, rather than to prove, whether it is at all possible for any person to remain “elusive” and untouchable. Through Lucie and the other characters in the novel, Kundera explores the phenomenon of abandonment, the peripheral position of the individual in the course of history, the cataclysmic sociopolitical changes and unyielding revolutionary requisites. The Joke is about, among other things, the depersonalization of individual existence, the impossibility of self-definition in the post-1948 Communist Czechoslovakia. Milan Kundera describes Lucie Sebetka, the tacit heroine in The Joke, as “a mysterious, elusive” character who “stands, so to speak, behind glass she cannot be touched” ( The Art of the Novel, p.
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