"The Garden of Eden" in Giovanni's Room

““You two together,” Jacques suggested, “you weren't happy together?”

“No,” I said. I stood up. “It might have been better,” I said, “if he’d stayed down there in the village of his in Italy and planted his olive trees and had a lot of children and beaten his wife. He used to love to sing,” I remembered suddenly, “maybe he could have stayed down there and sung his life away and died in bed.”

Then Jacques said something that surprised me…. Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden…”

Everyone, after all, goes down that same dark road- and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright- and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden…. Perhaps everybody had a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.” (Baldwin 25)

James Baldwin uses powerful symbolism in this passage from Giovanni’s Room, and it definitely gets his point across. It is easy to think about what could have been for Giovanni if he had never left Italy, if he and David had never met, about how unexceptional and untragic his life would have been. But Jacques’ point, about how “nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” rings very true- temptation is inevitable, and once Giovanni saw a route to something more, something bigger, he was helpless to bite the apple, and thus  “see the flaming sword,” blocking the possibility of return forever after he left. This does happen to people, within the novel and in real life, and it happened to David. He left his garden of Eden when he slept with Joey, and could never go back no matter how much he may have wanted to. It is evident within the novel that this has affected him ever since, keeping him closeted and predominantly unhappy.