James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room - Book Report/Review Example

His first encounter with discovering his sexual orientation started when he was a boy. He had an affair in Brooklyn with his friend named Joey; they kissed and made love to each other. The next day, he bullied him just to feel that he is dominant and is a real man. The action clearly states that he was not ready to accept that he likes boys, and maybe, he was also afraid that he might get teased by his friends. This action is common among children because fatherly and motherly roles reinforce a clear distinction between manly and womanly roles.

Furthermore, in a conservative culture like that of Brooklyn, such orientation is near to banned. But David's past does not end there, for it haunted him until his adult life. He started drinking and driving in order to forget. He moved from America to France to eliminate those painful memories and renew his life. Finally, he decided to commit his life to Hella, a woman, her girlfriend. Fight or flee Obviously, David decided to solve his problems - both his fear and lack of self-acceptance - by running away.

All his life, he hoped to change the past and to live a "normal" life, and this grew more evident upon meeting Giovanni, an Italian, his friend, and his lover. David and Giovanni have many things in common. They both ran away from home to forget about their "ugly" pasts. Both have or had a girlfriend and sexual affairs with men and women. Indeed, Giovanni's room served as a metaphor for their shared lives. In the novel, the room was described as small and squalor, in spite of a decent and goodly neighborhood.

It is dark with lots of curtains, its walls covered with a picture of a hoop-skirted lady and man in knee-breeches surrounded by roses, and trash and garbages are seen everywhere. Metaphorically, both David and Giovanni perceive themselves as people who can never make a difference, people who would rather hide behind the wallpapers of a well-defined social life, for their life is full of dirt and shame. They perform their true lives behind thick curtains, deprive of public view and criticisms.

Yet behind their seemingly dirty lives, they had hope. Both of them tried to renew and renovate the room. They were aware of the mess in their lives and they are eager to clean it together. These actions are optimistic, yet they never came true because of Giovanni's execution. The novel is tragic in the sense that the pure love between the two, however distasteful in their cultural values, once found, remains to be a dead end. The death of Giovanni's first boy in Italy is a case in point. It served as a foreshadowing of his future life in France.

David accepts this badly. Giovanni's optimism was the best thing that happened in David's life. Through him, and their seemingly fruitless attempt to renew their lives together, he finds a solution to his long-time problem. Not surprisingly, in the end, he accepted his "fate" instead and continued to live the life behind the wallpapers.