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Prologue
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 thinks back to a time when he was at Berck just a few weeks. He had no “accurate picture” of what his situation was or would come to be, and based on what he’d overheard his nurses and doctors saying, he believed he’d very soon recover both movement and speech. His mind raced night and day as he came up with ideas for novels and plays and daydreamed about the things he’d do once he was well.
There is another layer of cruelty and unfairness to Bauby’s situation—in the early days of his hospitalization at Berck, he still believed he’d make a full recovery. It is, perhaps, in this frame of mind that he learned to rely on future-oriented thinking and productivity—so that by the time he received his actual prognosis, to admit defeat and turn off his one connection to the outside world would seem like a profane waste.
Themes
Unexpectedly, one evening, a group of nurses, orderlies, and doctors burst into his room, dressed him, and lifted Bauby into a wheelchair. The group pushed him around the hospital to make sure using the chair wouldn’t send him into spasms, and upon finding that it didn’t, congratulated Bauby on being able to “handle the wheelchair” before returning him to his room and abandoning him once again. Bauby, depressed, felt like the nurses and orderlies helping him back into bed had been like “movie gangsters struggling to fit [a] body into the trunk of their car.” Bauby laid in bed alone, watching the rain pour down outside.
Bauby wrestles daily with feeling like a piece of meat—like a disposable object. Though his nurses and caretakers mean well, he finds himself humiliated by the physical and emotional way they handle him, and he resents being infantilized, lied to, and carted around against his will.
Themes
