Post 2, Question 8

I think Giovanni’s room represents different things to each character. For Giovanni himself, his room represents a shelter or sanctuary to protect him from the outside world, a place to escape his past in Italy and contain all the muddles of his life. For David, the room might represent the opposite, where as, instead of thinking of the room as a place of refuge from his past, he uses Giovanni’s room to lock his past up, and in turn gets locked in himself. But yet for both characters, the room also serves as a memory location of intense experiences, which made a relatively ordinary and insignificant room a symbol of enormous significance. At one point, David says, “I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room”. David’s guilt and desire for Giovanni can clearly make almost any room come to resemble Giovanni’s. It is a place of physical reality, which both connects and conjures up such intense memories and emotions when called to mind.