L’instance narratrice dans L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être et La Plaisanterie de Milan Kundera

In the narratological analysis inspired by Gérard Genette, the narrative instance refers to the voice that tells the story. Milan Kundera's novels, such as The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, illustrate two very different forms of this instance, which reflect the evolution of this Czech author's novelistic art and his philosophical conception of narrative. In The Joke, the narration is polyphonic; four narrator-characters take turns recounting their experiences. Each is an intradiegetic and homodiegetic narrator, offering their own internal focalization. This multiplicity destroys the single voice of the omniscient narrator and turns the narrative into a set of subjective perspectives in which the truth is constructed. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera adopts an extradiegetic voice, often confused with that of the author. The narrator intervenes, comments on, and questions his characters, creating a metalepsis that connects the level of fiction to that of philosophical reflection.
From Genette's perspective, Kundera shifts the role of the narrative agency from the homodiegetic plurality of The Joke to the extradiegetic, metanarrative voice of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In both cases, narration is not an imitation of reality but a laboratory for existential experimentation. Thus, according to Genette's perception, Kundera transforms narration into an instrument of thought: the narrative agency becomes the space where the novel experiments with the "field of human possibilities."