"I have no mission. No one has" 
 If there is a definition of the art form that is the novel, if there is a minimalist constitution somewhere, has Kundera violated it severely? 
 We can smugly complain that the narrator's voice is too strong; or stare in horror at passages where Kundera talks directly to us in first person; or whine about the fact that the characters are not formed very strongly, that they are mere puppets, abject tools used for nothing greater than sophistry. We may even expostulate that 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is not a novel in the first place; it is an essay in the guise of a novel. 
 But there is no violation. Because there is no constitution. 
 How then do we judge, if we are so required to judge, this different novel. How are we to judge Kundera as a writer of novels (not fiction)? Is he good? Is he bad? 
 **A novel can only be evaluated against the aesthetic that it explicitly binds itself in. That aesthetic is the product of the novelist's personal definition of the novel, what he has set out to tell, and when, in history, he has set out to tell this tale.**