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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
Though Bauby believes that most readers of Alexandre Dumas’s work would pick as their favorite characters D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers or Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo, Bauby now feels his favorite of Dumas’s creations is the “sinister” Noirtier de Villefort from The Count of Monte Cristo. The “living mummy,” a “profoundly handicapped creature” who communicates only through blinking, is, Bauby now realizes, literature’s first “and so far only” character with locked-in syndrome.
Bauby’s struggles have given him an unbelievable set of challenges—but have also allowed him to explore a new perspective on things he’d always taken for granted. He sees himself in characters and experiences he’d never considered before, and has a newfound empathy and appreciation for things he’d known all his life.
Themes
Before his stroke, Bauby had just finished rereading The Count of Monte Cristo for the first time in years. He had been “toying with the idea” of writing a modern-day adaptation of the novel himself—and feels his cruelly ironic meeting with the same fate as Noirtier is a kind of “punishment” for even thinking about tampering with a “masterpiece.” Now, “to foil the decrees of fate,” Bauby is imagining writing a novel which features a Noirtier-esque character who is “not a paralytic but a runner.”
Bauby wonders whether he is being punished for presuming to believe he could empathize with the experience of a paralytic as a well man. His humorous declaration that he is trying to re-transform himself into a healthy, able person by imagining himself as a character who is a “runner” shows that the irony and humor at the heart of the strange twists of fate he’s suffered are not lost on him.
Themes
