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Pathos
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
David doesn’t mention any precise dates, though his love affair likely takes place in a 20th-century, post-WWII world. But what the novel lacks in historical clues it more than makes up for with its careful exploration of place: one of the novel’s throughlines is its division between New York City and Paris, in both of which David spends his time. David grows up in New York City, though his love affair and confession both take place in France. The bulk of the novel takes place in Paris, where David frequents the city’s bars and lives in Giovanni’s room.
These two settings compete for narrative space and set up sharp contrasts against each other. “You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by,” David explains to Giovanni as they first meet, whereas New York is “high and new and electric—exciting.” Paris—with its “myriad, squat chimney stacks very beautiful and varicolored under the pearly sky”—changes with each passing season and bears record of previous centuries. New York may well be the opposite: the city seems so fixed in the present that David struggles to imagine “what it will all be like” many years from now. The two cities replicate the narrative dynamics of the novel itself, which is split between retrospection and an attentiveness to the present. David remembers his love for Giovanni, though he hasn’t left the narrative himself—he shares a story whose immediate aftermath he hasn’t yet escaped.
The novel’s pairing of both cities attunes the reader to a much deeper conflict. Apart from articulating the expatriate experience, these two cities accentuate the binary between America’s heterosexual culture and Paris’s growing gay scene. Paris is fluid if not vaguely feminine, at one point compared to a “whore”—descriptions that are antithetical to New York’s “power” and “movement.” The novel’s juxtaposition of these cities gradually amounts to more than a commentary on lifestyle or cultural values. Rather, New York and Paris become proxies for the tug-of-war between indulgence and denial that wracks David throughout the novel. He finds himself naturally attracted to Giovanni, yet despises himself for feeling so and aches for “the things and people I knew and understood.” He loves and lives in Paris but, in his shame, longs for New York.
The quirks and characters of different cities would have been familiar to Baldwin himself, who lived abroad for most of his life. As a self-described “transatlantic commuter,” Baldwin wrote Giovanni’s Room in Europe and died in France. Through its discussion of cities, his novel repurposes the transatlantic commute into a neat metaphor for the foreignness and disorientation brought on by David’s new sexual experiences.
Related Themes:
