Personal Calamity, Perseverance and Wisdom: Jean-Dominique Bauby’s ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' Anonymous College

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a text that Jean-Dominique Bauby pens with an objectivity typical of a memoir, intimate introspection characteristic of an autobiography, and a critical understanding of the leniency afforded by fictional storytelling, which come together to recount his life after a horrible accident that changed the way he lived forever; in the winter of 1995, when Bauby is at the peak of his career, he was driving his then nine-year-old son, Theophile, in his brand new convertible, to a restaurant for dinner, when he suddenly has a cerebrovascular seizure which leaves him in a coma for three weeks. He wakes up to find out that he is now paralyzed. The work juxtaposes the happening, and glamorous life he enjoyed as the editor-in-chief of a French Elle, with the pain of being restrained into to a life where he is incapable of speech or movement, and the only means at his disposal for being able to communicate are the blinks of his right eye. Despite this hurdle, he finds escape in the power of imagination and memory, and proceeds to work on a book that he had planned with a publisher. He found solace in the support of friends and family that visited him on weekends, and was able to finish this book by...