The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Bauby opens the chapter by recounting the last time he saw his 92-year-old father, which was during the week of his stroke. He recounts, in vivid detail, the way that he tenderly gave his father a shave. He recalls that, even in his old age, his father has “lost none of his splendor” (44). He recalls a black-and-white photograph of himself as child that had been stuck into the frame of a large mirror in his father’s house: “I was eleven, my ears protruded, and I looked like a somewhat simpleminded schoolboy. Mortifying to realize that at that age I was already a confirmed dunce,” he muses (44). In the photograph, he is at a miniature golf course.

He then intimates that both he and his father are, in different senses, locked-in and locked away from each other. Bauby cannot leave the hospital, and his father can no longer climb down the steps to his apartment nor voyage to see him. His father does call him occasionally, and Bauby compassionately notes that it must be difficult for his father to speak to a son who cannot speak back.

At the end of the chapter, Bauby states that his father has sent him the aforementioned photograph of himself. At first, Bauby cannot understand why. Then, he begins to remember the time the photograph was taken—an occasion on which his parents took him to a “windy and not very sparkling seaside town. In his strong, angular handwriting, Dad had simply noted: Berck-sur-Mer, April 1963” (45). The photograph was taken at the very same place where Bauby now finds himself.