Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Imagination, and Freedom
Isolation vs. Communication
Resilience and Determination
Irony and Humor
Summary
Analysis
Each morning at eight-thirty, Bauby’s physical therapist Brigitte arrives to exercise his arms and legs. Bauby feels the exercise, which is called “mobilization,” is useless—he has lost “sixty-six pounds in just twenty weeks.” Still, Bauby is able to see the irony of the fact that he started a diet the week before his stroke, hoping to lose some weight.
Bauby begins injecting his wry sense of humor and irony into the narrative as he examines the cruel—but kind of funny—fact that his dreams of weight loss did materialize after all, just in a much more dramatic way than he’d ever imagined.
Themes
Though Brigitte tries to get Bauby to squeeze his fingers as hard as he can, he cannot move his limbs. In a new development, he can turn his head about ninety degrees and can open his mouth about enough to insert a lollipop between his lips. As the physical therapy session ends and Brigitte massages his face, Bauby feels comforted by the ritual.
Bauby is no doubt frustrated with his miniscule progress much of the time—but in this passage, he shows how comforting, relaxing, and encouraging much of the work he does with Brigitte really is, and how much it inspires and renews him.
Themes
Bauby admits that he finds it at least “amusing”—and sometimes even comforting—that, at forty-five years old, he is back to having his “bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn.” He feels a sense of “guilty pleasure from this total lapse into infancy” some days—but other days he is painfully depressed by the state of his health, especially during his weekly bath. Each week, being sponged down, Bauby is reminded of the luxurious baths he used to love taking—soaks during which he’d drink good Scotch and read for hours. As he recalls his old life, he is “cruelly” aware of his new one.
Bauby goes back and forth between hope and determination and an abject, “cruel” awareness of his reality. In moments as ludicrous as his weekly sponge bath, both despair and humor are deeply present. Bauby is learning how to handle these conflicting feelings and avoid surrendering to the darker side of his emotions.
Themes
