Previous
Setting
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Like its narrator, the novel’s style is various and varied. Giovanni’s Room is taut, melodic, and anxious; its stylistic versatility often veers into instability. Much of David’s narration is fraught with tension as he wrestles with simultaneous repulsion and desire. When visiting Giovanni, he writes that “his touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his hot, sweet breath also made me want to vomit.” Elsewhere, he admits how “I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.” Baldwin balances love with hate, attraction and disgust at the level of the prose. The internal conflict in each sentence speaks to the tug of conflicting emotions within the protagonist himself.
When it doesn’t try holding diametrical opposites together, Giovanni’s Room proceeds in jagged, elliptical fashion. The reader can feel the vertigo of his sexual dilemma through the sudden lurches in sentence length. Startling aphorisms interrupt long reveries, and complex descriptions get punctuated by brutally short observations. “Giovanni’s face, which I had memorized so many mornings, noons, and nights, hardened before my eyes, began to give in secret places, began to crack,” David notes at one moment. Lines later, he admits that “I wished it were a stranger’s face.” The uneven cadence dramatizes a conflict between restraint and desire, as though even the novel itself is struggling for self-control after stretches of unstoppable prose. David’s obsession with control and longing for freedom take their form on the page through dramatic variations in sentence length.
Giovanni’s Room is equally notable for its experimentation with time. The novel makes loops between the past and present to create a non-linear story. The narrative begins in the present, traces David’s childhood, and briefly skips to a dinner with Jacques after Giovanni’s arrest—all before introducing his first meeting with Giovanni. Halfway through his account of the affair, David then pauses to retrace a conversation with his caretaker from hours earlier. Time, as Giovanni predicts, doesn’t stop in this story. But it takes on a disorienting quality that underscores David’s inability to move on from tragedy.
Related Themes:
