Kundera has long explored themes of impermanence and fluctuating identity--often to memorable effect, particularly in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and now even more so in Immortality. People believe that they can achieve immortality to a smaller or greater degree by maintaining an identity of themselves in people’s minds up until they die. In other words, death and immortality, ironically, is an inseparable pair more perfect than milk and cookies. When death approaches, so as immortality.