Giovanni's Room

“There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard—the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.”

A central theme in Baldwin’s novel is the inescapability of the self. Here David recognizes that running away to France was futile because his sexuality is not separable from his identity. David left America because he had multiple affairs with boys and was frightened of his growing attraction to them, but his desires only grew while in France until they couldn’t be repressed any longer.

“I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst.” 

David remembers his first sexual encounter with a boy, Joey, and the mixture of pleasure and fear that riddled their intimacy, and his future intimacy with men like Giovanni. One of David’s habits is his repression of shameful memories; by feigning ignorance to details of events, he deceives himself into believing that his attraction to boys is rare and not habitual. David comes to understand in retrospect that he only performs ignorance, and this performance reveals a deep remembrance and attachment to these memories.

“He wanted no distance between us; he wanted me to look on him as a man like myself. But I wanted the merciful distance of father and son, which would have permitted me to love him.”

David dislikes his relationship with his father because he feels his father shares too much about himself, which leads David to judge him rather than love him. David’s father thinks he can connect with David through their shared manhood, seeing his son as a friend rather than a child. David comes to associate distance with proper love, which affects his future relationships with Giovanni and Hella, whom he keeps at a distance.

“People who believe they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all […] but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.”

A central theme in the text is self-deception and how these lies create a false reality. David’s outward and inward lies do not ultimately change the fact that he is attracted to men, they simply create an illusory reality that David must sustain with more and more lies. Throughout the novel the reader sees David’s words and actions about his attractions contradict one another, exposing how thoroughly David has deceived himself.

“People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not—so grotesquely—resemble human beings.”

David describes his negative reaction to one of the drag queens who frequents Guillaume’s gay bar. Like how monkeys resemble people and create feelings of both recognition and distance, the drag queen resembles a man enough under his elaborate feminine costume that David feels uneasy identifying with him. As David associates gay men with femininity, he fears that if he gives in to his desires, he will end up like the drag queen—an exaggerated caricature of femininity.

“‘Well then,’ he continued, ‘as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place. And when I say everything,’ he added, grimly, ‘I mean all the serious, dreadful things, like pain and death and love, in which you Americans do not believe.’”

Giovanni teases David about his optimistic American sensibility that leads him to believe he can solve any problem with enough effort. To Giovanni, Americans are naïve to the serious realities of the world because everything is still new to them; as an Italian and now Parisian, Giovanni was born into the “Old World” that believes some aspects of life cannot be controlled. During their relationship, Giovanni weaponizes David’s Americanness against him to explain his different behavior and beliefs, which causes conflict between them and within David.

“I watched him as he moved. And then I watched their faces, watching him. And then I was afraid. I knew they were watching, had been watching both of us. They knew that they had witnessed a beginning and now they would not cease to watch until they saw the end. It had taken some time but the tables had been turned; now I was in the zoo, and they were watching.”

To prove that he is not a member of the queer “milieu” that frequents Guillaume’s bar, David situates himself as a tolerant observer of their world, but not a participant. David’s paranoia about his sexuality leads him to believe he is always under surveillance, especially by other gay men who he thinks are waiting for him to slip up. David becomes so wrapped up in his flirtatious conversation with Giovanni that he forgets about those around him, and now he feels fear under the reversed scrutiny. 

“But I could not be certain, really, that it might not be I who was making a mistake, blindly misreading everything—and out of necessities, then, too shameful to be uttered. I was in a box for I could see that, not matter how I turned, the hour of confession was upon me and could scarcely be averted.”

David’s hyper-vigilance of how others perceive his actions leads him to also be hyper-vigilant of others. David wants to set his friendship with Giovanni straight, but he fears that if he confesses to Giovanni that he read his actions as flirtatious, he may be wrong; Giovanni might then ridicule him for seeing desire where there was none. This passage also highlights David’s passivity in the face of conflict: Rather than be open and assert the outcome he wants, David feels he gets swept up in situations that can’t be “averted.”

“And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed; if you will only not play it safe.”

Jacques gives David advice about how to approach his relationship with Giovanni so it can be a beautiful experience rather than a shameful one. Jacques sees that David and Giovanni have a real connection, so he does not want David to miss the opportunity for love because he is afraid of being “dirty” or wants to “play it safe.” Despite David’s elaborate performance, Jacques knows David shares his attraction to men; rather than end up old, lonely, and ashamed like him, Jacques wants David to take the risk of love while he is still young.

“We simply stared at each other—with dismay, with relief, and breathing hard. I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan.”

David’s first sexual encounter with Giovanni mirrors the fear and excitement he felt so strongly with Joey back in America. This passage highlights David’s passivity and his feeling that his affairs with men, despite his best efforts, are inescapable. He acknowledges that his budding desire for Giovanni could turn out badly, but his body won’t turn away from the encounter; this fact contributes to David’s feelings that his affair with Giovanni was something that happened to him rather than something he consciously wanted.

“And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places?”

With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.”

David catches himself staring after a young man while out with Giovanni and begins to fear he will turn into a man like Jacques who fawns after any passing boy. David’s deeply engrained heterosexual values prevent him from imagining a positive, long-term future with men like Giovanni, so he attempts to correct his desires by rejecting every version of them. David’s inability to view his love for Giovanni as different than fleeting lust enhances the tragedy of David’s story; by pushing away the relationship that was built on mutual love, he moves towards having secret, desperate flings behind Hella’s back to appease his true desires.

“I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni’s, must first become a part of Giovanni’s room.”

Giovanni’s small maid’s room on the outskirts of Paris is a symbol of Giovanni’s grief-laden life up until he met David. David believes Giovanni wants David to be a savior that helps him escape his room and thus his anguish. David comes to resent the role because he thinks it ties him too definitively to Giovanni and prevents him from entering the heterosexual family life he yearns for.

“And I resented this: resented being called an American (and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever that was; and I resented being called not an American because it seemed to make me nothing.”

Americanness is a prominent motif throughout the novel that Giovanni and other Parisians use as a lens to understand David’s behaviors. David notices that Giovanni criticizes him when he acts too American and praises him when he acts non-American, which causes an inner conflict he’d never felt before. He at once does not want to be lumped into the stereotype of naïve, ignorant Americans, but also feels a camaraderie with his countrymen; he wants Giovanni to see him as more than just an American, but also knows how heavily his home-country has influenced his worldview. 

“I wondered what he had seen in me to elicit such instantaneous contempt. I was too old to suppose that it had anything to do with my walk, or the way I held my hands, or my voice—which, anyway, he had not heard. It was something else and I would never see it. I would never dare to see it.”

David idly stares at a passing sailor, but notices that he seems to recognize David’s desires and silently ridicule them. David—hyper-aware of his outward appearance and believing that his sexual desire for men manifests certain mannerisms—thinks the sailor read something different about David that gave his intentions away. In his retrospective account of events, David understands his yearning to ignore this difference within himself caused immense conflict.

“It became clearer every instant that what I had been afraid of had nothing to do with my body. Sue was not Hella and she did not lessen my terror of what would happen when Hella came: she increased it, she made it more real than it had been before.”

David tries to confirm his attraction to women by having a one-night stand with his acquaintance, Sue. However, his plan backfires when he finds himself only thinking of Giovanni and praying for their sexual encounter to be over quickly. David deceives himself into believing his relationship with Giovanni has little significance, but his failed desire for Sue in the world outside of his head makes him fear that the same aversion will appear when he must be intimate with Hella.

“In a way he was doing it for me, to prove his love for me. He wanted me to stay in the room with him. Perhaps he was trying, with his own strength, to push back the encroaching walls, without, however, having the walls fall down.”

After Guillaume fires Giovanni from the bar, Giovanni begins renovating the room to make it more livable for him and David. The room is a symbol for Giovanni’s life, so David perceives Giovanni’s renovations as the man’s attempt to make room for David in his life permanently. Giovanni wants to have a life with David without having to entirely give up his old identity; David, however, sees the endeavor as futile as he is going to leave Giovanni soon.

“Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.”

David tells Giovanni that he wants to leave Paris and go home, but Giovanni responds that the home David thinks about doesn’t exist. For Giovanni, home will only ever exist in his and David’s minds as a comforting image that reality will never live up to. Home is a prominent symbol throughout the novel that looms just beyond reach for many of the characters.

“But I assured him that he did not know Americans as well as I and that you had not drowned yourself. You had only disappeared in order—to think. And I see that I was right. You have thought so much that now you must find what others have thought before you.”

David runs into Jacques in a bookstore, where the older man mocks David for leaving Giovanni on his own for three days without word. Giovanni was deeply disturbed by David’s disappearance—going as far as to think David was killed in an accident—but Jacques, a fellow American, knows David left to think about what to do with his conflicting relationships. The passage highlights Jacques’s disdain for the cruel way David treats others and incorporates the motif of Americanness; Giovanni and Jacques both see Americans as thinkers rather than acters, and despite David’s resentment of the label, he continually adheres to this stereotype.

“‘I have never reached you,’ said Giovanni. ‘You have never really been here. I do not think you have ever lied to me, but I know that you have never told me the truth—why?’”

Giovanni finally confronts David about his secrecy during his three-day absence as well as during their entire relationship. David consistently keeps his true feelings to himself—not wanting to endanger the outer persona he has made for himself—but this restricted behavior leaves Giovanni feeling like David treats him as he would treat any other stranger he interacts with. Despite Giovanni’s best efforts and their forced intimacy in the small room, David still—even in the climactic moment—stays silent and hides from Giovanni.

“You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life.”

Giovanni accuses David of caring only about his purity and how people perceive him. David previously claimed to be distant from Giovanni because his American upbringing makes him believe being gay is immoral, but Giovanni thinks the cruelty David inflicts on others to keep up his moral-looking exterior is far worse than any actual sin they committed together. David is the reason Giovanni thought he could still live, and now that David is leaving him for a woman—not because he loves her, but because he can appear heterosexual again—Giovanni feels like David is sentencing him to death.

“I think—I think that I have never been more frightened in my life. When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life.”

When David and Hella leave Paris for the South of France, David feels himself becoming disgusted by her sight, which terrifies him because she is his ticket to a safe life in heterosexual society. The repetition of “I think” at the beginning of the passage highlights David’s hesitancy to reveal his thinking, even to the reader, because confessing would make his adverse feelings for Hella and his love for Giovanni definitive. Only in the present day through a retrospective lens can David see the folly in his past actions.

“What are we staying here for? How long do you want to sit in this house, eating your heart out? And what do you think it’s doing to me?”

David is visibly unwell—heartbroken and addicted to alcohol—but he refuses to tell Hella the real reason why he won’t marry her yet or leave for America, which is that he still loves Giovanni. Hella’s remarks in this passage expose how little David thinks of her as a person and considers her feelings. David’s silence is his tragic flaw: He believes by not revealing his true feelings he spares those around him, but really his silence so thoroughly closes him off from others that the distance hurts them even more deeply. 

“I knew it every time you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only you had told me the truth then. Don’t you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me?”

Hella finds David hanging around a gay bar with a group of sailors and comes to a revelation about David’s secret relationship with Giovanni. Looking back at David’s actions, she understands that his extreme closeness to her was only his way of covering up his affair with Giovanni. David’s passivity and secrecy forces Hella to seek out David’s truth on her own; if David had been open, Hella may have been able to forgive him, but by hiding the truth from her for so long, she can only see him as a liar.