Refined in the laboratory of social oppression,… Kundera's knowledge of personal freedom leads inexorably to the comic perception of victims of surveillance who are also, in their private ways, master practitioners of the art. So sophisticated is Kundera's rendering of this perception that one would have to look at 18th-century comedies of manners to find comedy and gulling on the scale of that in … The Farewell Party. Here in the festive atmosphere of a health spa and fertility clinic the characters take apparent holiday from the pressures of daily life, and once again love, or more accurately sex, is the swing on which they try to move past their destiny just as it is also the swing which returns them to it.

Like the plot of any rich comedy, that of The Farewell Party is difficult to summarize with its various subplots, counterplots and the numerous meetings between the two. Since personal destiny is again Kundera's concern, the multiple coincidences of plot and subplot are for him a natural métier. (p. 311)

The two themes of unwanted paternity and desired pregnancy are not plot lines at ironic odds with each other, but parallel illustrations of the unforeseen and uncontrollable which govern all the lives in this comedy, especially those who strive to supplant destiny with sexual machinations of their own. Nearly everyone is in the business of exerting some fantastic means of control over fate…. The juxtaposition of so many overlapping delusions is not simply mindless repetition but a comic device for innovating on the themes of helplessness and control.

Of course something must always go wrong when sex and love are made to bear the whole burden of personal freedom. And when we are led to wonder why these small personal maneuvers return people to the circumstances they wished to escape, the novel seems to reply that it is because as individuals they operate on too small a scale. Everyone has his plot, but there is always another and larger plot which gathers up and transforms the designs of individuals….

[At a certain] point in our experience of the narrative we begin to see its comedy differently. Just as the highly serious material of surveillance can turn farcical when its consequences are scaled down to the doings of guinea pigs and unfaithful husbands, so the farcical matters of paternity suit and fertility clinic can eventually turn back again toward tragedy, or at least toward something approaching it. That these trivial doings should be the matters upon which lives and dignity hang is, when the laughing is done, no laughing matter. What has always disturbed the people in Kundera's fiction is the idea of their missed opportunities, and doubly so since the opportunities they do manage to find are never quite equal to the demands made on them. In this case the opportunities at hand turn hollow and farcical becoming in the end agents of a larger pathos. (p. 312)

The analogies to Restoration comedy which seem so apt at first break down as we see the wider implications of farce. Among other things, the final scene in a comedy of manners brings each person's foolishness or ignorance home to him, but in The Farewell Party this moment of illumination does not take place. If there are, and it is not clear that there are, specific lessons to be learned here they will be of no help in the future, for these people are consigned to a life of farce. The brotherhood of man is left in the hands of nearsighted offspring who will always be unaware of their mission, and in this new twist to comedy even those people who learn of their mistakes are still somehow not brought to their senses.

The most extreme consequence of a man's actions, in this case murder, is to him weightless, even trivial. Here is a more trenchant display of destiny at work than tragedy generally allows, for these people do not die of their fate, they are discovered to be perpetually living with it. Looked at in this light, it is hard to imagine anything more chilling than Kundera's apparent light-heartedness. (pp. 312-13)