The diving bell and the butterfly book chapter summaries

Sign in. The true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffers a stroke and has to live with an almost totally paralyzed body; only his left eye isn't paralyzed. Forty-three year old Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby - Jean-Do to his friends - awakens not knowing where he is. He is in a Berck-sur-Mer hospital, where he has been for the past several weeks in a coma after suffering a massive stroke. Although his cognitive facilities are in tact, he quickly learns that he has what is called locked-in syndrome which has resulted in him being almost completely paralyzed, including not being able to speak. One of his few functioning muscles is his left eye.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. The protagonist of the book, who also happens to be its author, has a condition called pseudocoma, which means that he appears to be in a coma, because he is unable to move, speak or communicate verbally at all, but he is able to think, and to realize the severity of his own predicament, and also able to communicate by blinking his eyes. The condition did not manifest himself until he suffered from a stroke, which caused him to fall into a coma that lasted for almost three weeks. When he woke up he was mentally capable; he knew where he was, who his visitors were, who he was, but he was physically paralyzed aside from a limited amount of eye movement. His stroke seemed to come out of nowhere; he was traveling to work listening to The Beatles, and then after work goes to pick up his son to take him to the theater, but on the way there his mind and his vision seem to go blurry. He remembers wondering where his son has gone, and then everything else goes dark. When he first awakens, his mind becomes more active as his body becomes quite the opposite; he is also unable to process the information that medical staff are giving him about his condition, partly because he has never heard of pseudocoma before, and partly because hearing the details of the condition is almost too frightening to process.

Bauby's memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , isn't a Gothic novel, like most of the ones we've discussed so far, but those who haven't yet read the book would probably expect it to be. The book is actually the firsthand, non-fictional account of a man's life after a brain aneurysm has left him with what doctors refer to as "locked in" syndrome. In most cases of locked in syndrome, the patient is fully conscious and has the capacity to see, smell, touch, and taste everything.
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