3 ideas
The volumes are named Left Wing, Body and Right Wing, so the whole work is built as one symmetrical butterfly. Its wings organize the narrator's life along past and future around a central body, so the anatomical form structures time rather than replacing it.
Cărtărescu uses the insect cycle of transformation to frame human existence: earthly life, burial and resurrection correspond to stages of metamorphosis. The self is imagined as passing through a sealed, apparently dead state toward a transformed emergence.
In the book, remembered detail, dream and reality flow into one another rather than yielding realism. Where memories are missing, fantasies fill the gaps, so the visionary texture comes from recall and invention together.