Kundera uses alternating limited third person narration in this story. He switches between the inner thoughts and feelings of the young man and the girl. This style of narration is significant to the story. The woman is completely unaware of the negative view the young man begins to have of her because of the role she has taken on. This is dramatic irony.
We as readers know what the man is thinking whilst the woman does not. Kundera broke this story up into twelve parts. Each part signifies that the characters have moved deeper into the roles of “hitchhiker” and “unnamed driver.” In the twelfth section, the girl abandons her role by crying “I am me, I am me, I am me” (1017). This signifies the end of the game as well as the end of the story by the girl’s attempt to reclaim her identity. Kundera is a writer who focuses more on the words that form his characters rather than persona descriptions.
He feels that the reader’s imagination completes the writer’s vision. Thus, we learn little of the young man and his girlfriend’s appearance in the story. He is twenty-eight years old and she is twenty-two—so they are both still young. These two characters are characterized mostly by their interactions and thought processes. The girl is self-conscious, jealous, and anxious.
However, the hitchhiker she becomes has none of these traits. The hitchhiker is confident, insolent, and overly sexual. This sets up the virgin/whore dichotomy in which women are categorized according to their sexuality.
The girl is “pure.” The young man values her purity (1006). The hitchhiker is “dirty.” The young man pays her, forces her to strip and dance on the table, and then forces himself onto her sexually while all the time refusing to kiss her. The young man at the beginning of this story seems compassionate and kind. However, because of his inability to separate the fiction of this game from the reality of his real life, he begins to despise his girlfriend. He wishes to humiliate and dominate her.
The compassion he has at the beginning of the story is completely gone by the end. This story takes place in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. Czechoslovakia was still under communist rule at this time. Communism plays a large role in this story. One of the themes that Kundera has developed in many of his works is the effects that oppressive societies can have on relationships.
Communism clearly plays the role of the oppressive society. The young man expresses how the job he holds takes up most of his time and how even the little time he has left for his private life is not secret and can easily become the topic of discussion and gossip.
This two-week vacation was planned six-months in advance and the hotel required a recommendation from his job (1009). The game that the man plays with his girlfriend turns into a power struggle in which the young man is compensating for the lack of power he has in society and his life in general.
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Kundera Hitchhiking Game Summary 2017
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