: Characters are not meant to be realistic psychological portraits but "existential egos." They are experimental profiles used to test specific human conditions.
Kundera opens by rejecting the notion that the novel is merely entertainment or a mirror of social reality. He argues, instead, that the novel’s sole raison d’être is to explore what only the novel can explore: He famously draws from Edmund Husserl’s critique of modern science—that science has reduced the world to a mere technological object, excluding the “lifeworld” of subjective experience. The novel, for Kundera, is the art form that recovers that lost territory. It asks questions that philosophy and science cannot: What is the self? How do we make decisions in a world stripped of absolute meaning?