La presence du sacre dans l'oeuvre de Milan Kundera

For several critics, Milan Kundera's novels illustrate the disenchantment of the world and the demystification of all myths. In this thesis, we accept this point of view while insisting on the persistence of sacred elements in the works of Kundera. We formulate the hypothesis of the "inoculation" of a sacred part (i.e. myths, scenes and figures of the Holy Bible, etc.) in the prose of the novel---"le caractere concret, quotidien, corporel de la vie", as Kundera wrote---in order to anchor this often unstable matter and alleviate the brevity of the character's life. Our analysis of three novels (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Farewell Party and The Joke) reveals an oscillation between the sacred and the prose within the works of Milan Kundera. This movement is illustrated, in the text, by the motif of the baroque angel.