Giovanni’s Room: Unreliable Narrator 1 key example

In David’s case, unreliability may be more a state of mind. He does not so much consciously distort events to the reader as perhaps delude himself, unaware of his own blind spots and omissions. David is so possessed by self-contempt and homophobic shame that his account is inevitably colored by paranoia. A passing glance at a sailor turns into a moment that burns with humiliation. The caretaker’s visit makes him feel like a “half-grown boy, naked before his mother.” Even an exchange of morning pleasantries with a policeman manages to leave him “shaken.” David and his constant fretting lead readers to wonder whether he has only himself to blame for his circumstances.

As the story progresses, David’s chronic impulses come into view. A fuller portrait emerges of a character for whom lying has become a reflex, nearly second nature. David is compelled to make up stories and cheat on others, in some instances knowingly. He tells Giovanni that he “never slept with a boy before,” struts his masculinity before Sue, writes lies to his father, and leads a double life out of “sorrow and shame and panic and bitterness.” Baldwin pulls back the curtain to show a character at war with himself, masquerading ultimately as someone he is not.

Self-delusion requires self-knowledge. David’s performance of heterosexuality depends on some instinctual understanding of his queerness; to avoid his desires, he must also recognize them deep down. To try winning the reader’s trust, he must similarly recognize his untrustworthiness. At the start of the novel the unreliable narrator himself concedes his own unreliability, prefacing his account with a sincere admission. “People are too various to be treated lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight,” he self-diagnoses. He is sincere in his intentions yet the opposite in his actions. He both knows—and doesn’t know—the dark corners of his own self.