Memory, Imagination, and Self-Deception Theme Analysis

Gallimard presents his story to the audience as a memory, told from his prison cell — where he is sequestered following his very public conviction for treason — long after the affair with Song has ended. Song, in the form of a memory in Gallimard’s mind, enters at regular intervals through the play to tell his version of events, or add information to which Gallimard was not privy when the events themselves were happening. Gallimard often tries to coopt these interjections and force Song to tell events as he remembers them. He urges Song to leave Comrade Chin out of the story, and hides when Chin appears onstage; he tries to prolong the story of his loving reunion with Butterfly in Paris, and to stop Song from removing his Butterfly costume at the end of Act Two. He never succeeds in masking the truth, however. The characters Gallimard encounters on the stage are figments of his imagination, and their interactions happen almost entirely in Gallimard’s own or imagination, but he still cannot control any of them, and especially cannot control Song. This is a metaphor for the ways in which reality inevitably undermines the self-deceiving narratives human beings construct to comfort themselves.

During his court testimony, Song explains his belief that Gallimard never realized he was a man simply because Gallimard did not want to believe this was true. Song suggests men will always believe a person who tells them what they want to hear, even if the things that person is saying are absurd lies. Time and time again during their relationship, Gallimard accepts his lover’s suspicious “eccentricities” — like Song’s insistence on remaining totally clothed while they have sex — without question, and avoids situations that might force him to sacrifice his illusions. Recounting the night he ordered Butterfly to strip naked for him and then rescinded that order, Gallimard confesses his fear that he may have known the truth about Butterfly all along and simply shielded himself from confrontation of that truth in order to protect his own happiness.

After Gallimard finally sees Song naked — another imaginary sequence that mirrors the internal process of recognizing truth for the first time — he is forced confronts all that has happened to him, and processes his thoughts in a conversation with Song and in a monologue just before committing suicide. In both these moments of reflection, Gallimard suggests that the great pain and disappointment of his relationship with Song was not simply the fact that Song was a man — in fact, he tells Song multiple times that he would gladly take him back if Song would simply agree to inhabit the role of Butterfly again, suggesting Gallimard is not troubled by Song’s biological sex— but the fact that Song is an ordinary man. Butterfly, the fantasy he loved, was a product of Gallimard’s imagination who fulfilled his needs and desires as no living person could have. Confronting the fact that the person he adored was not a miracle of beauty and devotion, but an ordinary person with faults and secrets of his own, is more devastating to Gallimard than realizing he has been duped.

Though Song commits himself to deceiving Gallimard, his final exchange with Gallimard reveals how the character of Butterfly has also been an instrument of Song’s self-deception. Song comes to believe that Gallimard is fundamentally in love with the person who Song is—that Song and Gallimard share a love that transcends the “character” of Butterfly—and that Gallimard will continue to love Song even when Song reveals Butterfly to have been a fiction. When Gallimard elects instead to immerse himself in the world of fantasy — becoming Butterfly himself through the act of donning Song’s costume and committing ritual suicide — it is the ultimate gesture of rejection. He refuses to love Song, despite all they have shared, and confirms through that refusal that his love was always based in ideals rather than interactions, that he loved Butterfly the character and not Song the person. In the final lines of the play, when Song can be heard calling out “Butterfly? Butterfly?” while Gallimard lies dead in Butterfly costume, Song appears destitute in the same way Gallimard does at other points in the play. It becomes clear that, though Song believed himself to be in control of Gallimard, he was every bit as delusional in his assumptions about what they shared.