The goals we pursue are always veiled

The goals we pursue are always veiled is the opening epigraph’s central claim: people act toward marriage, fame, and other aims without fully knowing what those aims mean to them. Attributed to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it establishes uncertainty about desire as the book’s first interpretive lens.

Form and Attribution

The passage appears before the first numbered chapter and is credited to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Its placement makes it a frame rather than a statement spoken within a scene: before the narrative begins in August 2019, the reader is offered a proposition about how motives and meanings relate.

Desire and Unknowability

The epigraph develops its claim through two examples: a girl longs for marriage without knowing what marriage entails, while a boy seeks fame without understanding fame. It then widens from these particular ambitions to the meaning behind every human action, describing that meaning as wholly unknown to the person acting. The progression suggests not simply that people may misjudge a goal, but that the force giving their actions significance can remain beyond their own understanding.

Opening Function

By placing this assertion at the threshold of the story, the book invites readers to consider the gap between what characters pursue and what their pursuits come to mean. The epigraph does not specify which character or event will exemplify that gap; instead, it supplies a broad interpretive frame for the narrative that follows.