Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a memoir that recounts Jean-Dominique Bauby’s months in the hospital following a massive stroke that left him in a coma for 20 days. He goes from working as an editor with Elle magazine in Paris to communicating by blinking his left eye. His story accounts for 9 months of his hospital stay, including his newfound struggles, to his imagination that takes him on adventures. With locked-in syndrome, Jean is paralyzed from head to toe with the ability to swivel his head and blink just his left eye. He has lost a sense of independence. He is hooked up to various machines through tubes that help him breathe and eat. Staff must bathe him, and reposition him. His only escape is his mind where he has all the time in the world to “churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn [his] text by heart, paragraph by paragraph” (Bauby, p. 5-6) to prepare for his publisher to dictate his book one letter at a time with each blink …show more content…
He recounts one day when a nurse gives him a bath: “I can find it amusing, in my forty-fifth year, to be cleaned up and turned over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn’s. I even derive a guilty pleasure from this total lapse into infancy. But the next day, the same procedure seems to me unbearably sad, and a tear rolls down through the lather a nurse’s aide spreads over my cheeks. And my weekly bath plunges me simultaneously into distress and happiness” (Bauby, p. 16-17). His recount of his bathing practices shows Jean feeling a mix of emotions of being happy to be cleaned, but coming to the realization that he may forever need this assistance. Such routines in the hospital remind him of moments that were once a “joy [in his] previous life” (Bauby, p. 17). Even a bath he used to be able to take for relaxation, is now a chore for someone so they can take care of
The narrator, a new mother, is revoked of her freedom to live a free life and denied the fact that she is “sick”, perhaps with postpartum depression, by her husband, a physician, who believes whatever sorrows she is feeling now will pass over soon. The problematic part of this narrative is that this woman is not only kept isolated in a room she wishes to have nothing to do with, but her creative expression is revoked by her husband as we can see when she writes: “there comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word (Gilman,
Walk through a door, and enter a new world. For John, raised in home resplendent with comfort and fine things, Ginny’s family’s apartment above the fruit market is a radically different environment than his own. Economic differences literally smack him in the face, as he enters the door and walks into towel hung to dry. “First lesson: how the poor do laundry” (Rylant 34). In this brief, potent scene, amidst “shirts, towels, underwear, pillowcases” hanging in a room strung with clotheslines, historical fiction finds crucial expression in the uncomfortable blush of a boy ready for a first date and unprepared for the world in which he finds himself.
The irony in the need for survival by a suicidal diver in Robert Hayden’s “the diver”.
The narrator is trying to get better from her illness but her husband “He laughs at me so about this wallpaper” (515). He puts her down and her insecurities do not make it any better. She is treated like a child. John says to his wife “What is it little girl” (518)? Since he is taking care of her she must obey him “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”. The narrator thinks John is the reason why she cannot get better because he wants her to stay in a room instead of communicating with the world and working outside the house.
To initiate on the theme of control I will proceed to speak about the narrators husband, who has complete control over her. Her husband John has told her time and time again that she is sick; this can be viewed as control for she cannot tell him otherwise for he is a physician and he knows better, as does the narrator’s brother who is also a physician. At the beginning of the story she can be viewed as an obedient child taking orders from a professor, and whatever these male doctors say is true. The narrator goes on to say, “personally, I disagree with their ideas” (557), that goes without saying that she is not very accepting of their diagnosis yet has no option to overturn her “treatment” the bed rest and isolation. Another example of her husband’s control would be the choice in room in which she must stay in. Her opinion is about the room she stays in is of no value. She is forced to stay in a room she feels uneasy about, but John has trapped her in this particular room, where the windows have bars and the bed is bolted to the floor, and of course the dreadful wall paper, “I never worse paper in my life.” (558) she says. Although she wishes to switch rooms and be in one of the downstairs rooms one that, “opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window. ...” (558). However, she knows that, “John would not hear of it.”(558) to change the rooms.
Yasmin works at St. Peter’s Hospital in the laundry room. The dirty sheets that she washes are symbolic of this idea that the past is inescapable. For instance, Yasmin says, “I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets… a lot of times the stains are too deep and I have to throw these linens in the special hamper” (55). Through this symbolic representation, the author suggests the idea that the past is embedded in one’s life in the same way that the stains are embedded in the linens. With this symbolic representation, Diaz also reveals that the past is difficult to erase even after great effort, in this case, the special hamper which “gets incinerated” (55). The symbolic representation of the sheets is further emphasized when Diaz writes, “I hold up the blue hospital sheets in front of me and close my eyes, but the bloodstains float in the darkness in front of me” (67). This phrase addresses a different perspective of the overall idea that the past in inescapable. In this example, we are led to bel...
Degree of Self- Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms." Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray. Ed. Sharon M. Harris. New York: New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 44-48
The narrator is afflicted with temporary nervous depression. She makes it evident that this affliction is due to her repression by her husband, John. He has total control over her thoughts and feelings, her health, and over her life. He does not take her seriously and laughs at her but, in this society, “one expects that”. (Gilman 1) He controls every aspect of her life. He forces her to stay in a room which she despises, and consequently, drives her insane. Gilman builds up the story to convey her feelings of the repercussions a woman faces in total supervision and domination by a man. She follows her husband’s counsel of total bed rest, but deep within her, she knows this will be her destruction. However, as characteristic of a woman of this time period, she obediently accommodates the demands of the man. This leaves her no choice, but to subject herself to the anguish of being totally alone in a room with ghastly yellow wallpaper.
Hello everyone, I welcome you to “Inside a Directors Mind”. For those unfamiliar with my work, I am Julian Schnabel, director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This film follows the tragic struggles Jean-Dominique Bauby faces, a young man who suffers from locked in syndrome; a stroke causing the body and facial muscles to be immobilized while consciousness and eye movement remains. My purpose for tonight is to share three aspects this film employs, allowing it to reach its level of success. These aspects include sound techniques, visual motifs, metaphors and camera angles. Adding to these features, this film also explores the resilience of the human spirit, showing how robust one’s will to survive can be.
The story starts out with a hysterical.woman who is overprotected by her loving husband, John. She is taken to a summer home to recover from a nervous condition. However, in this story, the house is not her own and she does not want to be in it. She declares it is “haunted” and “that there is something queer about it” (The Yellow Wall-Paper. 160). Although she acknowledges the beauty of the house and especially what surrounds it, she constantly goes back to her feeling that there is something strange about the house. It is not a symbol of security for the domestic activities, it seems like the facilitates her release, accommodating her, her writing and her thoughts, she is told to rest and sleep, she is not even allow to write. “ I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”(162). This shows how controlling John is over her as a husband and doctor. She is absolutely forbidden to work until she is well again. Here John seems to be more of a father than a husband, a man of the house. John acts as the dominant person in the marriage; a sign of typical middle class, family arrangement.
She attempts to look better, for the sake of her husband, her conscious mind wants to be better to get out of that place. Her unconscious mind is beginning to connect the wallpaper with a mental trap. In the middle of the story the journal entry shows how the narrator sees herself like the house. Outside looks calm and beautiful inside there is chaos like the wallpaper in the dreaded room. Her thoughts are becoming more chaotic just like the wallpaper. There is no challenge in her live she is just supposed to rest and heal, but she spends the time contemplating the wallpaper. Looking at it day in and day out is unconsciously getting into her thoughts and bringing the chaos out into her consciousness. The narrator is confused because she believes that her husband loves her, but, he is controlling her in ways that she believes not to be helpful. She wants to do more with her life and thinks that the activity will help her feel better. There is a big discrepancy between what John believes and what the narrator believes. He wants her to rest, she wants to be active. He says it is all because he loves her but, she is not listened to and wants to make changes. . She is trying to follow the rules and be the person that her husband, John wants her to be. She consciously sees that she seems to give into the id more and more. The narrator wants her superego to be dominate so her actions don’t show her internal chaos. because she does not want to go to a doctor. The couple are still at odds when she admits to feeling worse and John insist she is doing better and belittles her. The doctor named in the text, Weir Mitchel, is a doctor that Gilman was treated by in real life. She has stated that she wanted to change the way he practiced medicine (Placeholder1). The story shows the chaos in the narrator’s
The Butterfly Diving Bell sits on my bedside table . It was a busy day when I finished and I'm struggling with how to express my appreciation for the best of the author , Jean - Dominique Bauby . As a beautiful French dessert , each crafted wonderful phrases should be savored. Posted by Bauby bears a sense of humor combined with depression that required for reading and slow digestion . He must have been a Morrissey fan .
The smell of disinfectant engulfed me as soon as I stepped into the hospital. My green sweater with the T-Rex on it did little to prevent chills from running down my spine, and I was suddenly very aware of how small and insignificant I must have looked. But despite all of this, the one thing I was truly terrified by was the knowledge that I was about to meet my new baby brother. I had been the baby of the family for the past five and a half years, and I wasn’t too keen on having to give up my title. Consequently, I was now the middle child of the family, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, the impact this would have on my life would be colossal.
“For the dead and living.” There are two people one there is a story. The other there is a poem called The Butterfly. One is Kristina Chiger and the other was Pavl Friedmann. They wanted to be free from the Nazis. They were living in the Ghetto. This happened during the years 1939-1945. The reason the Germans were killing them was because they were Jewish. Kristina escaped by hiding in the sewer, and Pavl died. Kristina was there for 14 months. Pavl was in the Ghetto for 7 weeks.
Two of the novels I have chosen to write about is ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho and ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ by Jean-Dominique Bauby. The reason I have chosen these books is because they are my top two favorites out of the four novels we have read and they are the most intriguing to me. What makes The Alchemist stand out is because it has a very inspirational lesson or moral in the end. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly however, triggers the more emotional side and yet again is very inspirational considering the idea that Mr. Bauby wrote a book communicating with only blinking his left eyelid.