The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The summer is now nearly over, and the nights have grown cold. Each day brings the familiar faces of the linen maid, the dentist, the mailman, the nurse who has just had a grandson, and the man who broke his finger on a bed rail last June. The start of his first autumn season at the hospital makes one fact very plain: Bauby has begun a new life, confined within the hospital walls to both his bed and his wheelchair.

September brings the end of summer vacations in the greater world, and also a new season to the hospital. Bauby inaugurates this new season with a new accomplishment of his own: his newfound ability to grunt a song about a kangaroo which has been taught to him as a form of speech therapy. He laments, however, that he has only heard faint rumblings of the outside world’s return to work and responsibility. He will hear more once his friends start journeying back to visit him. Théophile has new sneakers which light up every time he takes a step.

Claude reads back to him the pages that they have so “patiently extracted from the void every afternoon for the past two months” (131).