The dramatic irony of the stroke
When the memoirist finally regains his ability to communicate, he takes time to explain the dramatic irony of his stroke. Bauby was walking along one day, and everything was fine and normal. He recalls he was listening to the Beatles. Then, he wakes up in a hospital. He can only move his eyes, but he cannot move his body. He cannot really move his head, nor can he express anything on his face. He cannot speak. For a while, he does not even understand what happened, but he realizes that he had a stroke and almost died but survived in a paralyzed state.
His lucid consciousness
He is lucid, but how does he communicate that with his doctors? In time, they realize the dramatic irony that he is still experiencing consciousness and cognizance. His psychology is in tact! It is just that his body has stopped being able to move and therefore to communicate. They give him a new diagnosis: pseudocoma, where it looks on the surface like a true coma, but the pseudocoma hides the fact that he is lucid and conscious.
The challenge of communication
This man was a writer and editor before the stroke. He was able to communicate with precision and skill, and his whole life was about communicating meaning. Now, he has the most critical experience of his whole life, but he cannot communicate about it. He cannot speak what it is like to be on the brink of death, to be doomed to total paralysis, to be lonely, to mourn his own life. He mourns the whole world, knowing that he might never experience normal life again. And all he wants is to tell someone that this agony is occurring in his mind, but he is unable to speak.
The value of one word
The whole time, he wonders whether he will ever be able to communicate again. Then one day, he manages one word, by blinking to indicate letters in a queue. He spells a word, and the person understands him. Now, because of the medical condition, the value of one single use of language comes into full bloom. How much does it really mean that we can speak and write words to communicate with each other? This man knows the truth that is concealed by the dramatic irony which makes us take language for granted. He does not take it for granted.
The dramatic irony of life and death
There is a dramatic irony about life and death that can be called "religious," because it leads the author into lengthy discussions about God, about one's private revelation of human consciousness, and about the inevitability and strangeness of death. This is a perfect demonstration of how dramatic irony works, because all of his analysis is potentially obvious to anyone, but it took a situation like full paralysis to awaken his consciousness to the truth about life's pain and horror. Suffering leads him to wonder why anything exists at all. That is philosophically existential.
