Giovanni's Room

“And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to.” 

David reflects on how the freedom he found in France’s anonymity led him down a path of destruction. Looking back on his tumultuous affairs, David recognizes that he proposed to his then-fiancée Hella not because he loved her but because he wanted a sense of stability that could fix his erratic behavior. Without feelings of responsibility, David saw himself using and discarding people at whim, which the remainder of the book recounts.

“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.