5 - Ambivalent Narratives, Fragmented Selves: Performative Identities and the Mutability of Roles in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain

Summary

James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain takes place in New York in the span of a weekend, mostly within the confines of a church and the Grimes family's house. The content of the novel, however, is not confined to actions in real time, for as the characters clean house or pray in church, they revisit and reconstruct the past and present through memories and feelings. Baldwin's oscillation between time frames, and between different characters' points of view, is very important: It provides readers with conflicting and fluctuating understandings of textual meaning. As readers we come away from the novel with a sense of ambivalence and irresolution, for the novel's discord is never harmonized. Baldwin explores ideas about the fragmented self and the mutability of human identity through this uncertainty. He invokes ambivalence by direct and indirect means. Sometimes parts of the novel directly contradict other parts, but occasionally discongruity occurs within and between those contradictions; Baldwin conveys uncertainty both by what he writes and what his characters say and by what he does not write and by what his characters do not say. Thus, for example, by alternating between the said and the unsaid, Baldwin interrogates both Gabriel's unmistakable drive to power and John's nebulous homosexual desire.