The Diving Bell And The Butterfly: A Literary Analysis

It is such a long process for the average writer to create a story. These authors pour a huge amount of time into their work, striving to create something unique and fulfilling. Like these other authors, Jean Dominique Bauby expresses his great writing skill in his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. However, contrasting from these other writers, Bauby accomplishes his task by merely blinking his left eye; this process results in a successful masterpiece. Reflecting on powerful memories while laying motionless on a hospital bed, Bauby illustrates his life’s lost opportunities through time, imagery, and foreshadowing. After having a life changing stroke, Jean Dominique Bauby was left stuck within his own body and diagnosed with locked-in syndrome. At first depressed and wishing for death, Bauby soon becomes more accepting of his new bodily state, realizing that the faculties of memory and imagination can take him away from the confines of the hospital. In this situation, Bauby uses his intelligence and past
Foreshadowing occurs in multiple occasions while also tying in with the theme of lost opportunity. Bauby always had the idea of creating a novel about a man with locked-syndrome, which is quite ironic and a bit of foreshadowing due to the fact that this is his same condition. The lost opportunity deals with the writing of his novel. Another instance of foreshadowing occurs a week before Bauby’s stroke. Bauby helps his old-aged father to shave his face because his father can no longer do so without assistance. After Bauby’s stroke when he can no longer shave himself, he says, ““Now I am the one they shave every morning, and I often think of him while a nurse’s aide laboriously scrapes my cheeks with a week-old blade” (Bauby 45). This bit of foreshadowing also reflects upon the lost opportunity of Jean Dominique and his father’s