Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
Third-Person Omniscient; First Person (Central)
Kundera tells the story of his characters and his country from an intimate and comprehensive perspective. Take this description of Karel's frustration and inner turmoil, for example: "Why had he made love to the two women? On whose behalf had he done all that? For a long time now, anyone else could turn Marketa into a cheerful, sensual, and happy girl. Anyone but Karel. He saw himself as Sisyphus" (II.8.12).
Kundera totally knows his characters' most personal and intimate thoughts—and he's not afraid to share. He's also not afraid to inject a little unreliability into his characters' voices. For example, he interrupts Mirek's thoughts to tell us that the old fool is lying about his past feelings for Zdena: "He wants to step quickly on the gas so as to escape that memory. But this time I am not going to be fooled, and I call on that memory to linger awhile...there is Zdena's face, with its gigantic nose, and Mirek feels immense love" (I.17.2).
Kundera's narrative boldness extends to his own most vulnerable and often unattractive thoughts, including things that we kind of wish we didn't know about: "...I could think of nothing for a long while but the immense desire I had felt to rape my lovely friend. That desire has remained with me, captive like a bird in a sack, a bird that from time to time awakens and flutters its wings" (III.9.4).
This is very challenging to us as readers, particularly because Kundera chooses to use first person here; he's not even pretending to hide behind a third-person persona. But don't be fooled by the reality TV feel of the "I" in this or any other passage. After all, Kundera also describes seeing Éluard rising into the heavens during a circle dance, and we're betting that didn't actually happen.
For more on the first-person narrator in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, check out our character analysis of "Milan Kundera," the character.