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
As a “wan glow announces the break of day,” Jean-Dominique Bauby looks around his room and takes stock of the items around him: pictures of loved ones, posters, toys sent by friends—and an IV pole hanging over the bed to which Bauby has been confined for six months. He feels like “a giant invisible diving bell” is holding his body prisoner.
On Friday, the eighth of December of the previous year, Bauby suffered a massive stroke which affected his brain stem, the “inseparable link between the brain and the spinal cord.” Bauby survived the stroke—but is now suffering from “locked-in syndrome.” Paralyzed from head to toe but with full consciousness, Bauby is “imprisoned” in his own body. The only way he can communicate is by blinking his left eyelid, one of the few parts of his body he can still move.
As Bauby provides some basic background as to his physical condition, he doesn’t shy away from using cold, clinical, even bleak language to describe what his day-to-day life has become. He feels like a prisoner in his own body, cut off from the world around him despite still being physically present in it.
Themes
After the stroke, Bauby fell into a coma and did not awake until the end of January. When he did wake up, he found himself in the Naval Hospital at Berck-sur-Mer on the French Channel coast. For six months he has been living in this room, trying to break through his paralysis—he is able to move his limbs barely a fraction of an inch when he tries to stretch—and he is writing with the help of an interlocutor who interprets his blinks.
Though Bauby has been painting an almost unimaginable portrait of isolation and paralysis, this passage begins to shine some light on the incredible resilience and determination he still has within him. He works daily at physical therapy, despite knowing he will never walk again, and he isn’t allowing his isolation to shut him off from the outside world—he is “writing” and attempting to communicate not just with friends, family, and caretakers, but with the larger world.
Themes
Though the oppressive diving bell holds Bauby’s body down, his mind is “like a butterfly” in flight. His only escape is through his imagination—and his writing. In order to make sure he efficiently communicates with the “emissary” from his publisher who will take his dictation, he writes every sentence of his memoir in his head and perfects it by repeating it to himself upwards of ten times over.
The two titular symbols—the diving bell, which encases Bauby and weighs him down, and the butterfly, which symbolizes his mind as it takes flight through memory, imagination, and fancy, are introduced here. Bauby’s mind is his refuge, even if it never allows him to fully escape his new life.
Themes
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As dawn breaks, a nurse enters the room, interrupting Bauby’s flow of thoughts. She turns on the television as she checks his tracheostomy, drip feet, and vitals, and as Bauby watches a cartoon frog prance across the street, he begins to imagine what life would be like were he “changed into a frog.”
This short scene demonstrates Bauby’s mind in action. As the depressing and routine hospital checks begin to take place, he’s able to retreat into his mind and find comfort in even a simple imaginative exercise.
Themes
