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
Berck, originally a children’s hospital, now focuses mostly on aged patients—though the hospital also houses coma patients, obese patients, and “a battalion of cripples” who are recovering from accidents. Bauby calls these patients “tourists,” due to their short stays and good prognoses. Bauby and his fellow neurological patients, on the other hand, are “ravens of doom” who bring decided “uneasiness” to other patients whenever they’re wheeled to other wings of the hospital. In daily sessions in the rehabilitation room, as Bauby lies “tethered to an inclined board that is slowly raised to a vertical position,” he endures worried stares—and even sometimes cruel jokes—from the “tourists” and their visitors.
Bauby feels no small measure of resentment towards the “tourists” whose lives will soon go back to normal, while his will remain forever changed and yet unchanging during the long hours, days, months, and years ahead of him at Berck. Though Bauby is hopeful and resilient, it would be impossible for a bit of resentment, anger, and sadness not to creep in at the edges of his thoughts.
Themes
