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 recalls the late January morning when he first awoke from his coma. He awoke to find an ophthalmologist leaning over him, sewing his right eyelid shut. Bauby felt a terror that the man would sew his left one shut, too, but luckily the doctor stopped, packed away his tools, and declared that the right eye would need to rest for six months. Bauby peered at the man through his good eye, but the arrogant doctor did not notice his patient’s attempt to communicate. Bauby has, in the months since, stoked a loathing for this inattentive doctor, whose visits he both hates and relishes because they allow him to feel such strong emotions.
Though Bauby is surrounded by many genuinely kind caretakers, interpreters, nurses, and doctors—and even those he sees as incompetent are often well-meaning—he still has to contend with the fact that some of the people in charge of helping him adjust to his new life are simply ill-fitted to the job.
Themes
Bauby often feels he is in a kind of pressure cooker in the hospital—so much so that “The Pressure Cooker” is what he wants to title the play he is planning on writing based on his experiences in the hospital. Bauby envisions a “voice offstage” providing the inner monologue of the main character. In the play, Bauby envisions the main character, “Mr. L,” realizing in the final scene that his entire ordeal has been nothing but a dream.
Bauby feels a lot of anger and indignancy at his situation—and uses the vast landscape of his mind to imagine fictional scenarios for fictional versions of himself that allow him to feel catharsis, relief, and wishful hope.
Themes
