The aim of the essay is to problematize the main characters' conception of identity in André Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name. Due to Elio's inability to see himself and Oliver as continuously constructing and shifting bodies, the essay claims that the end of their relationship as they knew it during their summer in Italy was inevitable. By employing a critical discourse analysis and deconstructive approach, the way the characters position themselves during and after that summer is examined and critiqued. It is found that what contributes to the end of their relationship is their struggle with the multitude of aspects of their identities that are considered to be flaws or insufficiencies. Therefore, certain interests and aspects of their lives are kept a secret. In consequence, this secrecy hinders a full understanding of the other and reveals their idealization as wishful thinking, rather than reality.

This essay analyses Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman and Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski through a phenomenological lens. Through the theoretical framework, mainly consisting of Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Queer Phenomenology, I discuss how feelings such as desire and shame work through the subject and influence its relationship with their surroundings. The analysis concludes that the emotion of shame is an isolating feeling, causing the subject to shield themselves from their surroundings. At the same time shame is forgotten in its own temporality, whereas the emotion itself is mistaken as permanent by the subject in the feeling state. On the other hand, the forbidden desire feels temporary and like something that could be expelled from the body. Furthermore, I discuss how desire affects the relationship between subject and object, especially through the ways that desire complicates the hierarchal division between the two. I further posit how desire affects boundaries between bodies and how the forbidden desire creates the will to penetrate boundaries while at the same time maintaining them. Through the combination of shame and desire the subject is limited in their worldview, where the desire can feel impossible to navigate through the “life-lines” that Ahmed theorizes because of the shame that follows. The essay concludes that the relationship between shame and desire affects the relationship between subject and object mainly through the internalization of societal norms.