Writing
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room explores themes of love, time, and self-expression through the story of two men—an expatriate American, David, and an Italian barman, Giovanni— living in post–World War II Paris. Most importantly, the novel weaves these themes to pose a fundamental question: Is it better to live authentically and dangerously, or inauthentically yet unhappily?
Having never read Baldwin before, I was pleasantly surprised to draw parallels between his style and that of Ernest Hemingway. For those familiar with The Sun Also Rises, there is a similar understated quality in both writers’ prose. Like Jake Barnes, David is an unreliable narrator: on the surface, a typical American boy who doesn’t seem to offer much, yet beneath, he carries far more than he reveals.
Baldwin’s tone, however, is more theatrical. The novel opens in medias res, with David recalling a critical juncture: Giovanni is dead. From the beginning, Baldwin injects cultural and existential tension into the narrative while maintaining a brevity of syntax.
The relationship between David and Giovanni represents more than the experience of queer desire. It becomes a discourse between repression and expression, between an American ideal of autonomy and a European embrace of surrender, within a society that refuses to accept their relationship. This distinction unfolds in their temperaments: David, who can appear sober even when dangerously drunk, embodies caution, restraint, and internal conflict, while Giovanni is passionate, theatrical, and unguarded.
One pivotal scene that captures this dynamic occurs at their first encounter in a Parisian gay bar, when they debate the concept of time. Giovanni criticizes Americans for treating time as a triumphal procession:
“Time always sounds like a parade chez vous—a triumphant parade, like armies with banners entering a town” (Baldwin 34).
For Giovanni, time is inevitable and inescapable:
“Time is just common, it’s like fish for a water. Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies” (Baldwin 34).
David resists this fatalism, insisting instead on the possibility of choice:
“Time’s hot water and we’re not fish and you can choose to be eaten and also not to eat—not to eat, the little fish of course” (Baldwin 35).
Giovanni accepts inevitability; David clings to autonomy. Both positions haunt the novel, and both end in tragedy.
I felt these themes resonate personally, though not in terms of sexuality, but in self-expression.
As a first-generation Asian American, I grew up with what I call an immigrant burden—the sense that sacrifice and restraint are necessary to honor my family’s past. My father escaped the Cultural Revolution in China, which killed my grandfather and fractured our family. That history gave me, like David, a deep instinct for autonomy: to make choices, seize opportunities, and not waste what my parents fought to give me. Yet Baldwin also made me realize how autonomy can harden into repression, into hiding parts of oneself in the name of survival or choice.
David even echoes this American inheritance when he says:
“My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faded away from Europe into a darker past” (Baldwin 5).
In that line, I heard sentiments of my own family’s story, not in conquest, but in struggle, and in the same tension between repression and expression that shapes David’s fate.
Baldwin leaves us unsettled. Is it better to live passionately like Giovanni or cautiously like David? Is either choice truly free? Giovanni’s Room does not resolve the paradox, but forces us to confront it. And in doing so, it left me not just thinking about love and repression, but also about the quieter ways I’ve wrestled with authenticity in my own life.
