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
It is late August—summer is nearly over. As everyone else’s summers wind down and their lives return to normal, with work and school replacing vacations and leisure time, Bauby realizes that he has “indeed begun a new life”—a life within the corridors of Berck, and “nowhere else.” He looks forward to having more visits from friends who will bring him stories of their eventful summers, and revels in a strange kind of relief: for the first time in his life, he does not have the “awful sense of a countdown” that accompanies the end of a holiday season.
Though Bauby spent part of his summer fantasizing about the summer trips he was missing out on, there’s a part of him that’s grateful to exist, in a way, outside of time and outside of society. He can no longer access the joys of his old life directly—but the stresses, sorrows, and small disappointments that crept in are things he’s also now able to hold at arm’s length.
Themes
As Claude reads to Bauby from the pages of the book they’ve assembled together slowly over the course of the summer, Bauby is full of both pride and anxiety. He wonders if his work really “add[s] up to a book.” As Bauby takes in the room around him and looks carefully at Claude, he notices some objects sticking out of her purse: a hotel room key, a metro pass, and a hundred-franc note. He sees these items as “objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live.” He finds himself feeling pensive and wondering whether “the cosmos contain[s] keys for opening up [his] diving bell [such as] a subway line with no terminus [or] a currency strong enough to buy [his] freedom back.” Bauby determines that he must “keep looking.”
Even after finishing the book, Bauby still feels, in part, unfulfilled. He has been able to open up his diving bell a crack, but he remains isolated and frustrated with his inability to truly break free of it. Bauby retreats into his imagination in the book’s final lines, discussing sci-fi and fantasy solutions to his predicament as he imagines a future in which he is relieved of his solitude and able to regain his “freedom.”
Themes
