The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Here, Bauby recounts that, shortly before his stroke, he re-read Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. He recalls that one of the book’s characters, Grandpa Noirtier, is a nightmarish figure whom no one would ever aspire to be. “A living mummy” who is “three-quarters of the way into the grave” and who can communicate only by blinking one eye, Grandpapa Noirtier is “literature’s first—and so far only—case of locked-in syndrome” (47). Bauby muses that his re-reading of the novel cannot have been a coincidence. He reveals that he had been toying with the idea of writing a modernized, subversive version of the novel, in which vengeance remained the driving force, but the protagonist was a woman. He playfully likens his idea to treason against the literary gods, for which he is now being punished with locked-in syndrome. He also playfully confesses that sometimes he feels that Grandpapa Noirtier haunts the halls of the hospital. In a flight of playful superstition and in order to “foil the decrees of fate,” he is now planning a “vast saga in which the key witness is not a paralytic but a runner” (48).