“Is it better to speak or to die?” Silence and identity in André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name

Abstract

Call Me By Your Name is a novel by André Aciman published in 2007 that tells the coming-of-age story of an adolescent boy named Elio. While he spends the summer of 1983 in his family’s house on the Italian Riviera, the arrival of an American guest named Oliver will change Elio’s life forever. The teenager narrates the events that occurred that summer and how they unleashed a journey of self-discovery towards his queer identity. Nonetheless, taking into account the setting of the novel, revealing his own identity is a challenge for the protagonist, which creates several speeches that are relevant by their implicit meanings. In this final degree dissertation, I intend to analyse the key silences of the characters and establish a connection between the unspoken and the idea of identity. Therefore, I will start by introducing the novel and the key concepts that I will be working with, such as ‘identity’, ‘silence’, and ‘queerness’. Finally, I will then analyse these concepts in relation with the novel by André Aciman. In order to write this final degree dissertation, I will be using diverse sources of information that will help to create a theoretical framework and support the thesis argument: how silences both hide and reveal characters’ identities. Some of the theorists I will be referencing are Stuart Hall, Marianne Hirsch and Judith Butler.