The Tragic Nature of the Joke. The Joke Vs. The World in Two Days

Two of the novels which are deeply related to the experience within the limits of the totalitarian regime in the Eastern blocs are The Joke, by the Czech writer Milan Kundera, and The World in Two Days, by the Romanian writer George Bălăiță. Both Kundera and Bălăiță present in their novels the stories of individuals who pay the price of their destiny for the mistake of deviating from the imposed norms. Even if these two works present differences at the level of the narrative style, The Joke falling mainly within the modernist one and The World in Two Days in the postmodernist one, having allegorical characters, they have a series of common elements at the content level. Thus, the two novels propose a common theme, which reveals the collapse of a sacred world that falls prey to individuals obsessed with controlling other individuals’ lives.