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
Bauby describes the “serious hearing disorder” he has experienced since his stroke, in which his right ear is blocked completely while his left ear “amplifies and distorts all sounds father than ten feet away.” Even a plane flying overhead sounds as loud as a coffee grinder going off right beside Bauby’s ear. The many nurses and orderlies who attend to him often forget to close the door to his hospital room, leaving him at the mercy of the clattering chaos in the halls of Berck.
Bauby’s needs are not always met at Berck—it is a large hospital with many patients in it, and his nurses and orderlies, well-meaning as they may be, sometimes fall down on the job and leave Bauby at the mercy of his own changed body.
Themes
Bauby describes hearing gurneys, floor waxing machines, and other “auditory foretaste[s] of hell.” The worst offenders, though, are his fellow patients. One neighbor, a young child, was given as a gift a plush motion-sensor-equipped duck which quacked loudly when someone entered the room; one woman, who emerged from a coma “demented,” screamed “Fire!” over and over again at the top of her lungs several times a day.
Bauby describes the “hell[ish]” atmosphere his ward can have when things get too noisy—but even as he describes the deafening, sometimes frightful sounds, there’s an air of humorous chaos to his narration.
Themes
In rare moments of peace and quiet, Bauby likes to focus on the softly-fluttering butterflies inside his head. Their “barely audible” wingbeats require close attention, and Bauby is amazed by his ability to hear them better all the time even as his hearing does not improve one bit.
