Call Me By Your Name

In Part 3, Elio is away from the routine of his home life and immersed in an adult world that offers another opportunity for character development in his coming-of-age story.

Elio, alone with Oliver in a new city, is free to be less secretive about his relationship. In Rome, Elio and Oliver can more easily be openly affectionate with one another. They can push each other’s physical boundaries in the privacy of their hotel room. They can share new experiences because, although Elio has been to Rome before, it is not his home, nor is it Oliver’s. Rome becomes a symbolic space of new memories and intimacies.

The bookstore party is another situation that captures Elio’s coming-of-age story. He finds himself drawn to the personalities of the people at the party, and although the other partygoers are older than him, he sees himself in them. They, like Elio, are intellectually driven, social, and don’t reveal everything about themselves. Still, they have an affable openness about them that makes Elio feel like he’s getting to know them while still maintaining boundaries. At the party and subsequent barhopping, Elio participates in bawdy storytelling that reveals certain intimacies while protecting reality. Elio enjoys this kind of banter because it allows him to participate in the world in a way that doesn’t require the sacrifice of his vulnerability. The night in Rome makes Elio feel like a grown-up, like a part of an exciting world of jokes, joviality, and adventure. He compares these adults with his parents, whom he finds in this context to be pedestrian and in possession of small lives. Elio’s parents have a wide range of social connections, but they host more than they get out. For Elio, this is now a sign of their inability to be a part of the world. A trope of the coming-of-age story is being a teenager and judging your parents for having a life that doesn’t feel authentic to the life you want. Elio turns against his parents in a moment of bitter judgment, not as an indication of how he really feels about his parents but as a sign of his desire to grow up quickly and make his life into the kind he wants it to be.

The book party makes Elio feel that there is a subcultural world out there for him that he is being held back from. This is also a trope of adolescence. In most coming-of-age stories, young people crave adulthood while they simultaneously struggle to say goodbye to the innocence of childhood. The night in Rome shows Elio that there is a wider world out there for him, and he is eager and impatient to live within it.

Another notable moment in Part 3 is Alfredo’s story about the transgender Thai woman he was seduced by. Alfredo is besotted by what he sees as the exoticism of Thailand, which is, to Alfredo, drastically different from his home in Italy. Alfredo’s exoticizing of Thai people emphasizes a lack of cultural awareness and unveils some of Alfredo’s ignorance, but it also points to the desire to see and experience other people as inherently and mesmerizingly different. In a way, this story parallels what Elio is going through with Oliver. Elio desires Oliver as a source of joy and shame, which is similar to what Alfredo wants from the Thai transgender woman when he says he wants her as an in-between person. The sexualization of the in-betweenness of a person is a subconscious desire to have everything all at once and to project sexual desire onto a figure that is so exotic that sexuality becomes necessarily blurry. In other words, the exoticness of the sexual desire for the so-called in-between allows one to embrace desires that would perhaps be out of place in their everyday worlds. Elio also has a desire to have everything all at once, such as his simultaneous sexual relationships with both Oliver and Marzia. What’s more, though Oliver himself is not necessarily characterized as exotic, the novelty of their sexual relationship is. Because the relationship has a level of exoticism to it, their boundaries are also blurry. Through this parallel, Aciman demonstrates that surprising sexual desires are possible at any age and are not just symptomatic of youth.

Notably, Alfredo wants to know with certainty if the Thai worker is a woman or a man, unable to understand the malleability of sex and gender. The unknowability of sex and gender is also a parallel to Elio’s desire for Oliver. There is much about his attraction to Oliver that Elio can feel but not necessarily identify. Thus, Aciman demonstrates that there is a relationship between depths of passion and levels of unknowability. The mystery of desire and its source is an important part of developing attraction.

The first night in Rome is cinematic. Elio feels true happiness and freedom. But Part 3 is a climactic night, not a norm. Aciman uses Part 3 to highlight the romance of Italian cities, the liberal minds of Italian artists and intellectuals, and the power of a fun night out. It is a formative experience in Elio’s character development because it shows him what is possible for his future. But Aciman also foreshadows despair in this night of happiness, because happiness is fleeting, and Oliver will be leaving soon.