Giovanni’s Room: James Baldwin’s story is written between the lines

Baldwin tells the story as a first person narrator, so we tend to identify the main character with the author of the story. But that would be a mistake. David, is not James Baldwin, not a hero or a victim and not able to tell the truth. It is for us to discover that David is, in modern parlance, a d*ck, incapable of caring about the people he hurts, and that he will probably continue to be a d*ck for as long as he lives.