Giovanni's Room

Being gay was legal in France in the 1950s, but Chapter 5 reveals that prejudice was still rampant. The media uses euphemisms and evasion when describing “les gouts particulieurs” (149-50)—the particular tastes—of those who frequented “bars of the genre of Guillaume’s bar” (149). Much to David’s chagrin, the media so thoroughly downplays Guillaume’s involvement in the queer community that he becomes known as the shining “symbol of French manhood” (150). The moral outrage surrounding Guillaume’s murder makes casual and secret customers of the quarter fear being found associated with “le milieu,” as raids and demands for identification became more frequent. The media demonizes Giovanni for being an Italian foreigner corrupting the French people, but they still refuse to print the sexual motivation behind the murder: “Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell” (153). This panic exposes the precarious position of queer people in Paris, whose acceptance still depends on their invisibility and separation from dominant culture.

Chapter 5 illuminates how deeply Giovanni’s crime and execution affect David, explaining the melancholy and anguish of the frame narrative. The burden of his secret combined with his feelings of guilt cause him to distance himself from Hella, receding further and further into his secrecy to the point that he finds “her presence grating” (158). As David is unable to hide his heartbreak, Hella tries to share the burden so they can return to their plans of getting married, but David still fears “at every instance I would say too much. Perhaps I wanted to say too much” (160). His secrecy tears him from the person who could help him, yet his deeply ingrained paranoia doesn’t allow him to speak the full truth. As a result, he deals not only with the heartache of losing Giovanni but the heartache of watching himself lose Hella.

The passage about the murder in Chapter 5 reasserts David’s position as an unreliable narrator and illuminates how he projects his own emotions onto others to understand their actions. The media doesn’t write about Giovanni’s motivations behind Guillaume’s murder, so David must imagine how the crime took place. The entire narration of the crime is strewn with David’s suppositive statements—like “I can imagine him” (155) and “perhaps” (154, 155, 157)—emphasizing how David can only guess at what Giovanni was thinking. What David envisions as Giovanni’s motivation reveals more about himself and his perceptions of Giovanni than of the real Giovanni. Through Giovanni’s eyes, David sees himself as a savior, so he imagines Giovanni seeking out a savior to “tell him not to go back to Guillaume, not to let Guillaume touch him” (155). He imagines Giovanni calls David “My American” (154) because David can’t picture Giovanni seeing him as anything else. David also imagines that what set Giovanni off was not being used by Guillaume for sex but being ridiculed for a failure of manhood. David believes “one mockery too many” (156) would demand an aggressive response from Giovanni, an aggressive reassertion of masculine power through violence.

Despite running away from Giovanni, leaving behind his friends in “le milieu,” and attaching himself to Hella, David still cannot repress his desires and finds himself again seeking a sexual encounter with a man. By rejecting and ignoring his true desires for so long, David’s longing becomes unbearable. The encounter mirrors the “frightening […] drop” (20) in his guard in Part 1, Chapter 1 with the soldier from his youth. Unable or unwilling to change his behavior, David finds himself completely isolated from everyone he’s ever loved at the end of the novel. David attempts to save himself by telling Hella “if I was lying, I wasn’t lying to you” (163), but she refuses to uphold his illusions. She is a real person being hurt by his secrecy, and she refuses to let his fantasy dictate her future. Alone, David prays that his “troubling sex” (168) will be fixed so he won’t have to hide any longer, so he won’t hurt anyone anymore because of his indecisions.