O escafandro e a borboleta, de Jean-Dominique Bauby

The scuba and the butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby: metamorphoses of being - from cocoon to flight

Abstract

This article is dedicated to analyze the work The Scuba and the Butterfly (1997) by Jean-Dominique Bauby (1952-1997), affectionately called Jean-Do by friends and family. Bauby was a well-known French journalist, who worked as editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine Elle (in the 1990s). On December 8, 1995, he suffered a stroke (CVA) and was diagnosed with locked-in syndrome. This condition kept the journalist intellectually lucid, with his mental faculties preserved, but trapped inside an inert body. To write this work, our object of analysis, he resorted to a technique of the French alphabet in which one blinks the left eye when reaching the desired letter. Bauby created a narrator and used facts from his life and his post-disease existence as raw material for the literary writing. In this way, the work is characterized as autobiographical. Finally, it was informed that it was published on March 6, 1997, in France, and became a bestseller in a few months.