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
In the early weeks of June six months after his stroke, Bauby began composing a bulletin newsletter for friends and associates, which he writes and sends out monthly with the help of Sandrine. He’d learned that his old coworkers had started rumors that he’d become a “total vegetable,” and he wanted to try to dispel the mean-spirited gossip. His “hubris,” which motivated the first newsletter, has surprisingly had “gratifying results”—his friends and former associates now know they can “join [him] in [his] diving bell.”
Bauby, once a charismatic and powerful man, laments that gossip now paints him as a shell of his former self. Determined to take the narrative back into his own hands, he sends out a bulletin almost as a snide act of revenge—but finds that he is actually able to start a real, profound dialogue with many of his coworkers, and feels less alone through his communication with them.
Themes
Bauby now receives many “remarkable letters” which range from ones that are serious and existential and touch upon “the meaning of life” to ones that are chatty and quotidian, in which his friends simply capture “small slices of life” and relay them. He hoards the letters he receives like “treasure,” and feels they “keep the vultures at bay.”
