Leaving Giovanni's Room

Though I enjoyed reading Giovanni’s Room, I found that I wasn’t very moved by the supposedly tragic aspects of the ending. Though this could be partly because Giovanni’s fate is revealed so early on in the novel that I was expecting it and had accustomed myself to the idea of it, I think it is more than that. To me, for something to be truly considered tragic, the characters need to be losing something in their downfall, and I didn’t really feel like any of the characters lost anything of great value. I found David and Giovanni’s relationship to be a kind of disturbing one. They meet each other and immediately become involved with one another—clearly they were motivated by little more than lust at the beginning. Even though both characters claimed that they loved the other, to me it seemed to be quite an unhealthy relationship. Giovanni is completely obsessed with David, literally telling him that he would want to die if David ever left him—that’s not healthy. David claims that he loved Giovanni, but what we see of their relationship never really convinces me of that. Even the destruction of David’s relationship with Hella isn’t really something to be mourned (even though in some ways I was more convinced of their mutual affection than I was of David and Giovanni’s): the fact that they seemed to be settling for each other and David’s hidden preference for men would have soured their relationship in time anyway. Considering all these things, while Giovanni’s fate and the end of the novel were certainly sad, I wouldn’t call them tragic, simply because none of these characters had enough of value to lose.