Direct, Occasionally Chatty, Intimate
Kundera has a way of speaking directly about his characters and their personalities (check out "Character Clues" for more). There's absolutely no beating around the bush: if someone is a man-chaser/woman-chaser, a nag, or a proponent of rape fantasies, Kundera will just tell you.
Using a first-person perspective, Kundera reveals his thoughts with equal openness—and sometimes it's just TMI. But in other moments, he's just an author chatting us up about his dreadful experiences or his creative process:
I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. That is why I am always hesitant about joining that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do? After all, my characters need to have names. (IV.1.1)
But as the general tone of the work is pessimistic—it is about death and disenfranchisement, after all—Kundera tends toward pensive reflections about how things got this way: "Because ever since they expelled me from the ring dance, I have not stopped falling, I am still falling, and all they have done now is push me once again to make me fall still farther, still deeper..." (III.9.5).
You can sense the nightmare in the hypnotic rhythm of his writing here. Things are definitely not going to improve anytime soon.