Giovanni's Room

Giovanni is a young and handsome Italian émigré to Paris who works as a bartender for Guillaume and who is set to be executed for murdering the man. Giovanni is David’s male love interest and the first man he has a long-term relationship with. Giovanni is outgoing and charismatic, but his foreign background creates a sense of mystery around him that the habitués of Guillaume’s bar perceive as dangerous. David, despite initial hesitance, is immediately enraptured with his conversation with Giovanni, as the young man’s charm makes David speak openly in a way he “almost never” (36) does with others. Throughout their relationship, Giovanni continues to speak openly with David, but David also senses in Giovanni’s words a “terrible desire to please” (61).

As an Italian, Giovanni describes himself as friendly and passionate, in comparison to the Parisians and David who are too full of “measure” (36) to live happily. Giovanni thinks David is melodramatic for overthinking his decisions, though David believes Giovanni is the “theatrical” (49) one for his extreme displays of emotion. Giovanni takes pride in his masculine aggression and David sees that Giovanni “liked to feel himself debrouillard, more than equal to any challenge” (153). Despite his bravado and overt strength, Giovanni is also deeply sensitive, and cries often throughout the text. Unlike David, Giovanni accepts his fluid sexuality, but he also feels that David’s confusion and paranoia rub off on him and change him for the worse.

Underneath Giovanni’s bravado, he is anguished and grief stricken as the result of his wife giving birth to a stillborn baby in Italy. Giovanni left Italy for Paris, forsaking God and believing his life was over; that is, until he met David and realized he wanted to live to make a life with him. Giovanni brings David into his small maid’s room at once to save David and to save himself. The room is a disaster of Giovanni’s life’s belongings, but he tries to renovate out of love for David. As David is Giovanni’s only reason for living, David believes Giovanni killed Guillaume to escape “this dirty world” (24). Without David, Giovanni gives into his fear, “which was so fast that it had simply become a void” (24), and he turns into everything he hates: first Jacques’s boy, then a “street boy.” David’s absence creates a noticeable transformation in Giovanni’s appearance, as he becomes “weak and pale and unattractive” (133) as he struggles for survival.

Jacques is an older, rich, Belgian-American businessman and acquaintance of David. David sees Jacques antagonistically because of his fears of turning out like the older gay man, but David also relies on him for survival. Jacques has a habit of chasing after younger men who need him for his money because “he was so lonely” (23), and at his age he doesn’t believe he can handle the potential heartbreak of a long-term relationship. David looks at Jacques with contempt, thinking his behavior is pathetic, but comes to pity the man when he sees Jacques’s self-hatred at his loveless affairs.

Jacques plays up his feminine qualities—particularly his voice—to annoy David and test the limits of his tolerance. Because of his femininity, David and Giovanni both refer to Jacques by the derogatory term “fairy” and think he is “silly” but “not too bad” (23). Knowing Hella dislikes him, Jacques exaggerates his flamboyance to make her uncomfortable and to embarrass David. Though Jacques wants David to have a better experiences of love than he has, he resents David’s performative distance from the queer community and his cruelty to others.

Jacques wins his and David’s “deadly game” (42) concerning David’s sexuality when David flirts with Giovanni, but he hates how long David led him on with his denials. When David leaves Giovanni, Jacques becomes Giovanni’s benefactor and smugly shoves the relationship in David’s face with “spiteful and triumphant eyes” (147). Jacques eventually becomes David’s only connection to Giovanni after the arrest as he updates David on the development of Giovanni’s case. Jacques also feels responsible for Giovanni’s tragic end, as he refused to give the boy any more money. A letter from Jacques about Giovanni’s execution date prompts David to remember his relationship with the man, which precipitates the entire narrative.

Hella is David’s female love interest throughout the book and another American expatriate in Europe. Hella likes to have fun, and her relationship with David develops based on a predication of non-seriousness and play. In Part 1, Chapter 1, Hella initially perceives their attachment as so shallow that she laughs at David’s proposal, thinking he is joking. While in Spain considering David’s proposal, Hella discovers that despite previously viewing herself as an independent, modern woman because of her enjoyment of “drinking and watching [men]” (4), she holds traditional dreams about family. She realizes she “is not really the emancipated girl [she tries] to be at all” (123) because she wants a partner and children. David latches onto this statement, as he believes this shared dream of a heterosexual nuclear family will offer them both security.

Hella is intelligent, well-read, and inquisitive. David celebrates these traits and defends her against Giovanni’s insults of her being a “moon-faced little girl” (142). Hella’s curiosity becomes threatening when pointed at David because she catches him in his lies. Hella calls out inconsistencies in David’s false narrative about his and Giovanni’s relationship, like the incongruency of Giovanni’s deep anguish at David’s disappearance with David’s declaration that he and Giovanni were only roommates. Hella believes that a man will “always [be] a stranger” (125) to a woman, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to help shoulder David’s secret burden. When words fail on both sides, she tries to reaffirm their connection through physical intimacy, but David comes to feel nothing at her touch.

When Hella enters the narrative as an active participant in Part 2, Chapter 4, David describes her as having short hair, a tan, and a “brilliant smile” (119). As the seasons change from fall to winter, she becomes “pale and watchful and uncertain” (159), mimicking the growing coldness in her relationship to David. Hella feels like David is putting her life on pause without telling her why, and when she finds out he has been sleeping with other men, she accuses him of ruining her happiness forever. As an American, Hella thinks “happiness was all we had” (165), so by ruining her happiness, David has also severed her connection to her home. Hella ends the book by leaving David for America, hoping she’ll find a boy to distract her on the boat ride home.

Guillaume is the owner of a gay bar in David’s neighborhood who is an antagonist for both David and Giovanni. Guillaume is a gay man who David and Giovanni view as predatory to “les jeunes” (50)—young men—for whom he has “more hands than an octopus, and no dignity whatever” (61). David and Giovanni dislike Guillaume for his flamboyant and theatrical behavior, thinking he is “really not a man at all” (61). They consider Guillaume a “disgusting old fairy” (150) who preys on young men because he is desperate for love and has the money to buy it. Giovanni describes him as “ugly, ugly, he has a body like sour milk” (107) and David imagines him as “precipitate, flabby, and moist” underneath his “theatrical dressing gown” (155).

Despite claiming his relationship with Giovanni is “strictly business” (32), Guillaume exploits the young Italian’s need for a job and carte du travail in exchange for sexual favors. When he becomes restless, Guillaume invents things to be angry about to force Giovanni into his hand, but Giovanni doesn’t usually get angry at Guillaume’s performances because they “made [him] want to laugh” (60). Guillaume likes boys who are vache—hard to get—so once Giovanni becomes openly tied to David, Guillaume feels Giovanni loses his desirability. David can sense Guillaume’s dislike for him and his part in making Giovanni lose his “drawing power” (156).

Guillaume’s “dangerous mood[s]” (106) create major conflict for Giovanni, who is usually at the receiving end of the older man’s frustrations. Guillaume is from “one of the best and oldest families in France” (106), which causes him to act respectable whenever he feels embarrassed by a younger man’s rejection. When Giovanni resists the older man out of loyalty to David, Guillaume fires Giovanni and publicly humiliates him to make himself feel better. By the end of the novel, David imagines no change in Guillaume’s behavior before his death. The media romanticizes Guillaume after his death, which deeply infuriates David who knows the man’s true nature.

David’s father is a minor character who teaches David about the expectations for heterosexual men. After the death of David’s mother, his father begins to drink more excessively and spends his money on a slew of girlfriends. When Aunt Ellen draws David’s attention to the behavior, he begins to despise his father and can only think about what women he has been “interfering with” (15). David comes to mimic his father’s behavior, seeing sexual prowess with women as the proper way to reassert his own heterosexual masculinity. He admires his father’s “boyish and expansive” (12) charm when he is drunk and picks up the habit of drinking as well. David describes his father as “quick to laugh” and “slow to anger” (11), but he also frequently fights with Aunt Ellen whenever they start to banter.

David’s father doesn’t understand David’s prolonged absence in France, and his motivation for withholding money is to bring the boy home to settle down. Much like how he remarried after his years of rowdiness, David’s father wants David to return home to build a family and a future before he “let[s] the world pass [him] by” (91). His father’s expectations haunt David’s relationship with Giovanni, as David doesn’t want to reveal why he stays in France but desperately needs money to continue to live. David’s father only capitulates when David reveals he plans to marry Hella, displaying how David believes acceptance from his father hinges on adherence to heterosexuality.

David’s father—much like David himself—hides and runs from his pains through repressing his emotions and drinking heavily. He tries to act like David’s friend rather than an authority figure to get David to open up to him, but David still judges the man’s flaws. David sees that his father’s enjoyment of being “buddies” covers the fact that he “had been suffering, was suffering still” (19). The grief of his wife’s loss still follows David’s father, which makes him cling to his only son and worry deeply about his secretiveness in France.

Sue is an acquaintance of David’s whom he sleeps with for a night to re-confirm his attraction to women. Sue is a minor symbolic character who represents David’s fears about his sexuality and his fickleness with the lives of others. In failing to feel desire for Sue, David becomes anxious that he won’t feel desire for Hella, or any woman, again. David describes Sue as “blonde and rather puffy” with “small breasts and a big behind” (95) that he finds easy to mentally undress. Sue is quite hesitant to let David sleep with her—knowing he’s likely just using her for a one-night stand—and calls herself “built like a brick stone wall” (96) because of her reservations. Sue and David’s history together is ambiguous, but Sue’s statement that David “rather dropped out of sight” (95) implies David used to see her somewhat frequently before moving in with Giovanni.

Sue forces David to confront his self-deceptions and the illusory reality he built for himself concerning his sexuality. He uses his initial eagerness imagining her naked as a corroborating sign that he is attracted to her, but when the moment comes to leave for her apartment and become intimate, he holds back. David senses a “grave distrust” in Sue’s rigidity, as she has evidently been used for quick pleasure by other men before, but he pushes on to get what he wants. Sue doesn’t force David to make another date when she realizes he is just another lonely boy. Her rejection of his lies that he’ll call her again because he “hate[s] to make dates” (101) forces David to feel humiliation at the cruel way he treated her to protect his own self-image.

Joey was David’s best friend during his teenage years and the first boy David ever had a sex with. David and Joey were once inseparable friends, but after their intimacy, David pushes Joey away and hardly sees him again. Joey is a minor, static character, whose memory haunts David as the first awakening to his “troubling sex” (168). David initially describes Joey in diminutive terms: He is shorter than David, “quick and dark” (6), and David likens him to a baby or a “doomed bird” (8). After their intimacy, when David begins to think anxiously about what they’ve done, he suddenly sees “the power in his thighs, in his arms, and in his loosely curled fists” (9) that all point to his maleness. David cuts off all communication and even begins to bully him.

Prior to their sexual encounter, David and Joey acted like average teenage boys; they whistled at passing women, sneakily drank alcohol before the legal age, and whipped each other with wet towels. In retrospect, David sees how joyful their experience together was, how it seemed that “a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love” (8). David seeks forgiveness for the way he treated Joey and for lying to Giovanni about never having slept with another boy before him.