ABSTRACT
Two well-known contemporary novelists, Iris Murdoch and Milan Kundera, have, each in a single novel, eloquently expressed the view that “theory” is fundamentally useless in illuminating, let alone overcoming, the quandaries of human life when major decisions have to be made. Both of them essentially identify theory with general statements from which practical prescriptions might be inferred to aid in the resolution of the highly contingent problematic situations in which human beings inescapably find themselves. Both writers considered this insight into the irreducible particularities of individual human lives important enough to invoke it allusively in the very titles of the novels in question, Under the Net and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it clearly provides the central rationale or message of the novels.
