The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Bauby’s sense of wonder is a constant throughout his memoir. On one level, the reader can see his vivid recollections of crystalline memories of his former life, conjured in precise detail from his hospital bed, as a searing duality. While he undertakes one life in a paralyzed body, his previous adventure-filled life persists. On another level, however, we see him creating new observations full of wonder and beauty—again, while housed in an inert body. This testifies to the continuing coexistence of the magical and the mundane, even in his new life as a profoundly disabled person. His choice to render the hospital staffin shimmering and transcendent detail attests to his ability to witness and marvel in their full humanity, as well as his own. Amid the deep suffering he does not shy away from portraying, Bauby is able to conjure up enduring images of wonder and beauty. Through this sustained dichotomy, he forms the message that life is composed equally of the magical and the mundane. He often takes it one step further by finding the magical within the mundane. In so doing, he attests to the power of the human spirit and its ability to experience, understand, and create beauty—despite the mortality that will ultimately disturb and claim it. 

Many of the marvels Bauby recounts are delicately imbued with a shadow of grief and loss. This is a natural consequence of the catastrophic loss he has suffered. Beyond that, though, it is a purposeful literary conceit. By choosing to describe the precious and fragile beauty of his children, for example, alongside his existence inside of the diving bell that closes him off from them, he forms a treatise on the fragility of all life. The vivid, searing beauty of his recollections invite the reader not only into his own inner life, but to take stock of their own lives, and enjoy them while they can. Bauby’s own life as he knew it was snatched from him, irrevocably and suddenly. While he persisted in creating and experiencing beauty following his stroke, the musings that flowed from him after that catastrophic event were necessarily informed by his deep loss. The central motifs of the diving bell (representing limitation, mortality, and the enclosure of his illness) and the butterfly (representing life, beauty, pleasure, and imagination) pose a central conflict. One of the salient messages to be gleaned from this conflict is that life, as beautiful and full as it can be on any given day, is also extremely fragile.