In spite of its grave subject matter and sprawling lyricism, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is in many ways a deeply funny book. The irony of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s situation is not lost on him—once a wealthy, charismatic man with the world at his fingertips, Bauby is now confined not just within a hospital, but within his own body. As Bauby uses humor and irony throughout the book to stave off pain, anger, and hopelessness, he suggests that even in the bleakest of situations, there is light to be found.
Bauby is a gifted writer and a witty, canny thinker. These natural proclivities served him well in his life before his stroke, allowing him to rise to the position of editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine Elle, sustain several romantic relationships with a series of women, and enjoy a bustling social life. Once “locked-in” after his stroke, though, Bauby needed to be able to deploy his wit, humor, and keen observational eye not just to advance his career or further his social and romantic life—but literally to save himself from misery and revive his will to live. Throughout the book, Bauby uses both humor and irony at key points in the narrative in order to bring levity into the pain of his situation and draw readers’ attention to the fine line between cruelty and comedy, in everyday life and extraordinary circumstances alike.
Throughout, he feels a profound sense of loss that he can no longer make people laugh through conversation—for example, while spending a day with his former partner Sylvie and their children, Céleste and Théophile, he wishes he could laugh at their jokes and deliver some of his own. In order to combat this loss, perhaps, Bauby doubles down on finding the humor in the more cruelly ironic aspects of his memoir, hoping not to lose his relationship to his sense of humor entirely. He states in the vignette “Bathtime” that he has lost sixty-six pounds in just twenty weeks in Berck-sur-Mer; ironically, he’d gone on a diet in an attempt to lose a few pounds just a week before his stroke. Bauby is forced to confront how small the problems of his old life seemed—and examine how cruelly his own wishes have been twisted in the wake of his terrible accident. In “The Empress,” Bauby catches sight of his face in a reflective surface covering a bust of Empress Eugénie (the patroness of the hospital and the wife of Napoleon III), seeing himself for the first time in weeks. He is amused rather than repulsed by his own foreign, ruined face—he sees the superficial deformities which have resulted from his stroke as a cruel “joke.” He begins to laugh, and imagines Eugenie laughing alongside him. He is trying to make light of his own situation—but it is too much to bear without the help of an imaginary friend sharing the burden alongside him. Bauby also notices several other strange ironic coincidences throughout his stay in the hospital. Bauby’s father sends to the hospital a picture of the young Jean-Dominique, healthy and lithe and playing at the beach at Berck-sur-Mer; Bauby begins to feels his stroke may have been a “punishment” for having been considering writing a novel which reimagined the paralytic Noirtier de Villefort from The Count of Monte Cristo in a modern context; he is forced to watch a commercial for a personal computer in which an offscreen voice asks “Were you born lucky?” as he lies inert in bed, drenched in his own urine after his catheter breaks. As these cruel—and sometimes deeply comic—ironies pile up, Bauby finds a sardonic kind of light in each of them. He’s unable to change his fate or his circumstances, so he might as well laugh at the twists his life has taken and revel in the paradoxes that surround him.
Jean-Dominique Bauby uses humor and irony to cope with his seriously unlucky situation. In moments when he finds himself in physical or emotional turmoil, facing down the deep well of sorrow he could plunge into at any moment, the only thing that pulls him back from the brink is the almost comical horror of what has befallen him. Bauby doesn’t shy away from those uncomfortable, frightening moments—instead, he chooses to lean into them and use them to challenge his reader’s conceptions of the line that exists between tragedy and comedy.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Irony and Humor ThemeTracker
Irony and Humor Quotes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
One day, for example, I can find it amusing, in my forty-fifth year, to be cleaned up and turned over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn’s. I even derive a guilty pleasure from this total lapse into infancy. But the next day, the same procedure seems to me unbearably sad, and a tear rolls down through the lather a nurse’s aide spreads over my cheeks. And my weekly bath plunges me simultaneously into distress and happiness. The delectable moment when I sink into the tub is quickly followed by nostalgia for the protracted immersions that were the joy of my previous life.
A strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter—when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke. My jovial cackling at first disconcerted [the Empress] Eugénie, until she herself was infected by mirth. We laughed until we cried.
A niche must be found for us, broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department. Of course, we spoil the view. I am all too conscious of the slight uneasiness we cause as, rigid and mute, we make our way through a group of more fortunate patients.
For half an hour, the alarm on the machine that regulates my feeding tube has been beeping […] I cannot imagine anything so inane or nerveracking as this piercing beep beep beep pecking away at my brain. As a bonus, my sweat has unglued the tape that keeps my right eyelid closed, and the […] lashes are tickling my pupil unbearably. And to crown it all, the end of my catheter has become detached and I am drenched. […] Here comes the nurse. Automatically, she turns on the TV. A commercial, with a personal computer spelling out the question: “Were you born lucky?”
“Listen, there’s no way I’m going to wait in this!”
“Pity,” Joséphine snapped. “It would do a sinner like you a lot of good!”
“Not at all. It could even be dangerous. What if someone in perfect health happened to be here when the Madonna appeared? One miracle, and we’d end up paralyzed.”
At the Café de Flore, one of those camps of Parisian snobbery that send up rumors like flights of carrier pigeons, some close friends of mine overheard a conversation at the next table.
“Did you know that Bauby is now a total vegetable?” said one [gossiper.]
“Yes, I heard, a complete vegetable,” came the reply. […] The tone of voice left no doubt that henceforth I belonged on a vegetable stall and not to the human race. […] I would have to rely on myself if I wanted to prove that my IQ was still higher than a turnip’s.
Thus was born a collective correspondence that keeps me in touch with those I love. And my hubris has had gratifying results. Apart from the irrevocable few who maintain a stubborn silence, everybody now understands that he can join me in my diving bell, even if sometimes the diving bell takes me into unexplored territory. I receive remarkable letters. […] I carefully read each [one] myself. […] I hoard all these letters like treasure.
I should not feel morally superior to Olivier, for today I envy him his mastery of the storyteller’s art. I am not sure I will ever acquire such a gift, although I, too, am beginning to forge glorious substitute destinies for myself.
Like millions of Parisians, our eyes empty and our complexions dull, Florence and I embarked like zombies on a new day. […] I mechanically carried out all those simple acts that today seem miraculous to me: shaving, dressing, downing a hot chocolate.
[Claude’s] purse is half open, and I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking. I’ll be off now.
