Similarities Between Giovanni's Room And Invisible Man

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man did more than refute the classical canon through their content. The two literary works went further by pushing the norms of the black male prototype and his societal position in America. Giovanni’s Room and Invisible Man tell two very dissimilar stories, yet both protagonists endure the same mental adversities. Baldwin’s narrative tells the heart -wrenching story of sexual exploration through two star-crossed lovers, David and Giovanni. David, a supposed white hetero- male travels to France where he encounters Giovanni. The two begin a passionate journey through love, lust, sex, and death. Giovanni’s Room acts simultaneously as a site of empowerment and a location of weakness.

His encounters with Giovanni cause David to wrestle with his sexual identity
Like David, Ralph Ellison’s nameless protagonist struggles with his identity, but more so racially than sexually.

Set in the South and then transitioning to New York, the unidentified narrator, like David, undergoes a voyage through self discovery. He is expelled from a prestigious black university, loosely based on Tuskegee University, then ordered to go to New York where he is to find work for a year to pay for his last year’s tuition; however, Ralph Ellison’s protagonist begins to accept that he can no longer return to school and starts to look for work all while capturing the attention of a communist like organization called, The Brotherhood. The narrator’s involvement with The Brotherhood in addition to other encounters with white men in the novel affects the protagonist’s racial identity causing him to slowly begin to see his true position as a black male in American society. By the end of the novel, the narrator lives underneath the city where, unlike David, his space becomes a place of

power.
Space and interaction with other characters are not the only external factors that subliminally affect David’s sexual and Ellison’s narrator’s personal identity.

There are objects and language utilized in each literary work that perpetuates identity hardships for both characters. These objects and language located in each text that subtly play an integral role in David’s and Ralph Ellison’s protagonist’s sexual and self discovery are referred to as signs. Within a course outline electronically provided by Brown University on Linguist Ferdinand De Saussure, the term sign, as it pertains to language, is deconstructed in a thorough manner which makes its definition universally comprehended. Brown University outlines a sign as, “A focus on how meaning is constructed, not what the meaning is (as in content analysis). It thus treats its objects as texts (as meaningful on the basis of shared codes and conventions), not as autonomous objects with pre-existent and universally apparent meaning.” In essence a sign is the arbitrary construction of words. It is understood that an object is an object (i.e. a table is a table) because we have been told such; however, the terminologies and meanings for terms are not interchangeable globally due to the autonomy or freeness of their created meanings (ex. a chair in English is called and possibly have a different use in Spanish). Ultimately, language is a system of arbitrary signifying signs which produces the various words we utilize on a

daily basis.
Giovanni’s Room and Invisible Man are filled with signifying objects and language. These objects and language found in each novel are both representations as well as subliminal factors that in addition to space and interaction between the main characters (David and the nameless narrator) and other characters enable David and Ellison’s unidentified protagonist to continually be sexually and personally misconstrued.
For one to fully grasp the sexual and personal difficulties that both David and the Invisible Man’s protagonist encounter, Lacan’s sub sector of his symbolic order, “The Mirror Stage,” must be comprehended. Irish author and scholar Leanne Waters discusses Lacan’s mirror stage in her article, “The Significance of Jacques Lacan’s Theory of the Mirror Stage in the Construction of Subjectivity.” She makes reference to the “Ideal-I” (a false sense of self-identity produced from the infantile phase of the mirror stage) positing:
The infant misrecognises his own mirror-image – what Lacan refers to as the “Ideal-I” (“Mirror Stage,” 1164) – as being a whole, constant and independent entity. Nevertheless, he identifies this entity to be himself, thus making a fictional correspondence, as what the infant sees does not and will never coincide to what he feels. (Waters, Midnight Flanerie)
Water’s description of the Ideal-I corresponds with the narrator’s journey to self-awareness in Invisible Man. Like the quote, the protagonist has a false perception of who he really is. His fallacious perception makes him feel as Waters asserts, “whole, constant and independent.” His oppressors encourage the narrator’s falsehood of self by making him think he is an equal. For example, his award of the briefcase after the battle royal and the brotherhood making him feel as if he will be the new voice for the people. However, eventually, the protagonist begins to question his Ideal-I after the death of Brother Clifton (a young rambunctious member of the brotherhood) which makes him start to reevaluate his situation in his environment. Like the infant in “The Mirror Stage,” what the narrator perceives to be self does not correspond with how he begins to feel about his relationship within society.