Reflections and Trapping the Self in James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room”

It’s taken me years to finally getting around to reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and I am disappointed that I waited this long to read it and let alone teach it. When my “Black Expatriate Writers in France” course got approved, I knew I wanted to teach Baldwin. I could have done Another Country; however, I wanted to have novels, hopefully, set in the locales where we would visit. While the majority of Giovanni’s Room takes place in Paris and not in Nice, the region serves as a setting at the beginning and end of the novel as we see David contemplating the events of the novel. Today, I want to look at the ways that reflections frame the novel.

Giovanni’s Room begins with David looking out of a window in Nice as he thinks about Giovanni in a jail cell in Paris as the latter awaits his execution. David stands in front of the window staring at his reflection. He says, “I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times.” David describes himself, his reflection staring back at him, then he addresses the read directly, saying that we have seen a face like his many times before.

The face that we have seen many times, according to David, is the face of his…