Call Me By Your Name

“P.S. We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.”

This quote is pulled from Elio’s journal as his love for Oliver begins. This quote takes on a metaphorical meaning. Just as Elio understands that people can play more than one instrument, so too does he understand sexuality and identity as spectrums. Neither Elio nor Oliver is necessarily tied to one instrument of sexual desire or one instrument of personhood. This fluidity is an important part of the human experience. This also echoes the philosophy of Heraclitus, whom Oliver studies.

“What I forgot to earmark in that promise was that ice and apathy have ways of instantly repealing all truces and resolutions signed in sunnier moments.”

Elio struggles between the coldness and the sunniness of his love for Oliver. His feelings are so sensitive to Oliver’s reactions to him that Elio can’t understand how to feel comfortable with either his bitterness or his warmth towards Oliver. This quote emphasizes the intermittent and chaotic nature of young love and deep passion. It also highlights that any resolution Elio makes to be logical about his feelings for Oliver ends up turning into chaos. This reveals that love is inexplicable and, therefore, uncontrollable. Here, the unrequited nature of Elio’s love enhances the stress of his feelings. The use of the term “earmark” in this quote implies that Elio tries to apply the logic of his reading life to his real life. In reading, a reader can earmark a page as a bookmark or as a reminder of something to note on that page. But in real life, it is much more difficult to know when and how to note an important moment while it is happening.

“How could anyone intuit the manner of someone’s thinking unless he himself was already familiar with this same mode of thinking? How could he perceive so many devious turns in others unless he had practiced them himself?”

Here, Elio characterizes Oliver as insecure despite his outward appearance of confidence. Oliver manifests his insecurities when he projects his own shame onto the behaviors of others. If someone behaves in a way that makes Oliver angry or annoyed, it is because Oliver worries that he has the capability for that behavior as well. This quote demonstrates how closely Elio observes and analyzes Oliver, and how well he gets to know him from afar.

“No, she would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age.”

This quote captures Aciman’s message about the purity of youth. Youth has no shame because it is only by living through various levels of external judgment and conformity that people learn shame. Shame, therefore, is not inherent, but learned. This emphasizes that the love and passion Elio feels for Oliver is only possible in young people.

“What I didn’t realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.”

Elio realizes through a more adult perspective that his youthful desire to test his passion for Oliver with slow starts, boundaries, and hypothetical “no’s” was a way of trying to get what he wanted without admitting to it. This reveals that Elio hadn’t realized in his youth how to directly ask for or go for what he wanted. Only with age does Elio discover the ways he surreptitiously communicated his desire. This quote also implies that at the time, Elio didn’t want to admit to himself that he wanted Oliver, perhaps because the fever of his passion was scary.

“You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.”

As tortured as Elio is about Oliver, he also feels uplifted by his friendship with him. Oliver’s approval of Elio makes Elio feel good about himself. This connotes a new type of passion because, prior to meeting Oliver, Elio didn’t need other people to boost his self-esteem. Elio’s character development is simultaneously grown by and regressed by Oliver. This paradox parallels the paradoxical nature of love itself. The candle Elio will light on every altar in Rome is a hyperbole that captures the relief he would feel if he could express himself. That Elio is Jewish and would not be in a Catholic church offering thanks to an altar only increases the hyperbole of the statement, which captures how out-of-character Elio feels now that he’s in love with Oliver.

“It told me that if I were no longer transparent and could disguise so much of my life, then I was finally safe from them, and from him—but at what price, and did I want to be so safe from anyone?”

Elio is young enough that he likes to share his life with his parents, who are extremely supportive of and interested in his life. Keeping his secret about Oliver away from his parents makes Elio feel that he is doing something wrong. He wonders why he doesn’t tell his parents but also enjoys keeping the secret. This is yet another example of how Elio contradicts himself; it is another way in which Elio is trying to figure out what exactly he is feeling. Elio doesn’t want to become a secretive person who believes that by not telling people things, he will keep these things safe. And yet, he can’t help but keep his secret to himself. This is a formative moment in which Elio, a teenager, starts keeping his parents out of his world.

“Or are ‘being’ and ‘having’ thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit…”

In his sexual awakening, Elio learns the dearth of language available to capture what he’s feeling and going through. In this quote, the words “being” and “having” are both appropriate for his situation and wholly incapable of truly capturing what’s going on. He experiences desire as a desire intrinsically tied to another’s body and his own, which he describes here as a “perpetual circuit”. This is a new layer of sexuality for Elio, who now experiences his desire as simultaneously of another person that is also himself.

“In thirty, forty years, I’ll come back here and think back on a conversation I knew I’d never forget, much as I might want to someday. I’d come here with my wife, my children, show them the sights, point to the bay, the local caffès, Le Danzing, the Grand Hotel. Then I’d stand here and ask the statue and the straw-backed chairs and shaky wooden tables to remind me of someone called Oliver.”

Elio understands the significance of his summer with Oliver in the moment. He recognizes that it will turn out to be a formative life experience, so formative that he will remember Oliver in a few decades. Elio imagines himself with a wife and children, which reveals that he is not under any impression that he and Oliver will end up together. That his love for Oliver is so intense yet finite is notable. What’s more, though B. is the setting of many summers and winters, a place that is a second home for Elio and his family, he believes that as an adult, he'll remember B. for the memories it holds of Oliver, the memories of one summer.

“‘Yes, in a way—that’s how I always say things: in a way.’”

This quote characterizes Elio through his indirect communication. Elio is young, which accounts for some of his lack of directness, but he is also deeply intellectual and shy about certain things. Elio’s personality is less brash than someone like Oliver's. Elio finds this a struggle, but it is ultimately the way he is. Though it gets in the way of Elio expressing himself to others, it protects the deep thoughts within himself.

“I liked feeling so rested. Maybe the ancients were right: it never hurt to be bled from time to time.”

This quote points to the importance of suffering. Through willful suffering, such as bleeding by a leech (the practice alluded to here) or bleeding emotionally, people experience the full humanity available to them. A life without suffering is also a life without risk or love.

“This felt special. Like showing someone your private chapel, your secret haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others. This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life.”

This quote characterizes Elio’s intimate relationship with literature. The bookstore is a sacred place to him, one that he shares with Oliver. The simile of the bookstore as a “private chapel” captures how being a reader is a central tenet of Elio’s identity. Sharing the bookstore, then, is like sharing a very intimate part of himself. It offers up a safe space for someone else to use and potentially love abuse.

“…‘Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,’ which I’d never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.”

This quote highlights the novel’s titular intimacy: calling someone by your own name. Notably, Elio is unable to describe this realm he finds himself in. It is also notable that the older narrator version of Elio recalls this experience as singular. That he doesn’t share this intimacy with anyone else for the rest of his life emphasizes how peculiar, special, and passionate Elio’s love for Oliver is.

“Could intimacy endure once indecency was spent and our bodies had run out of tricks?”

In his relationship with Oliver, Elio discovers that indecency can symbolize desire, and desire can motivate indecency. The connection between indecency and desire emphasizes Aciman’s message that love and passion, because they are of the body and the mind, can debase people in ways that are meaningful and even beautiful. In this quote, Elio questions the limitations of this type of desire. When there are no more boundaries to cross with Oliver, will their desire dissipate? This question also highlights Elio’s early understanding that his love for Oliver is not one that would stand the test of time. Instead, it is a love that ought to be captured in a particular moment in time.

“I envied these lives and thought back to the thoroughly delibidinized lives of my parents with their stultifying lunches and dinner drudges, our dollhouse lives in our dollhouse home, and of my senior year looming ahead.”

This novel is a coming-of-age story. Though it is focused on Elio’s experiences of sex and love, this quote demonstrates that coming-of-age also contains an interrogation of how life is lived. In comparison with the revelers at the book party, Elio finds the adult lives of his parents provincial and boring. Senior year of high school is a symbolically important time because it is the last year of Elio’s childhood and marks the beginning of a series of decisions he will make about his own life.

“I’d never traveled in this world. But I loved this world. And I would love it even more once I learned how to speak its language—for it was my language, a form of address where our deepest longings are smuggled in banter, not because it is safer to put a smile on what we fear may shock, but because the inflections of desire, of all desire in this new world I’d stepped into, could only be conveyed in play.”

The world referred to in this quote is the rambunctious and social world of the literati. Elio finds himself in this subculture because he sees that his usual tactics of using banter to mask his vulnerabilities can be celebrated as a way of socializing. In comparison with other social lives in which people are either fully open or fully enclosed, this subculture makes space for the joviality that exists in the middle. The banter is not a way of hiding but rather a way of expressing one’s desire. Desire, here, is characterized as the motivator for fun.

“As we ambled down an emptied labyrinth of sparely lit streets, I began to wonder what all this talk of San Clemente had to do with us—how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same. One could even grow old and not learn a thing but this.”

San Clemente is a symbol of homesickness, desire, and celebrated romantic spaces. In this quote, Elio considers the existential implications of this symbol. This quote highlights his wisdom and maturity. He realizes that large questions about whether or not people truly change are life-long questions. This quote emphasizes that Elio is deeply enmeshed in his own coming-of-age story, in which he is already considering what the value of youth is and what the future has in store for him.

“’Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi,’ my father added, quoting Montaigne’s all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie. I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë’s words: because ‘he’s more myself than I am.’”

In this quote, Elio and his father turn to beloved writers and philosophers to help explain the state of mind and human quality they’re discussing. This quote emphasizes how Elio and his father rely on literature to express what they cannot themselves. This quote also gets to the heart of Elio’s affair with Oliver. These quotes from Montaigne and Brontë characterize the luck of love. What happened between Elio and Oliver was possible because they were at the right place at the right time; in other words, to translate Montaigne, “because it was him, because it was me.”

“I began to wonder what turn my life would have taken had someone else shown up instead. I wouldn’t have gone to Rome. But I might have gone elsewhere. Wouldn’t have known the first thing about San Clemente. But I might have discovered something else which I’d missed out on and might never know about. Wouldn’t have changed, would never be who I am today, would have become someone else.”

In this quote, Elio realizes that romanticizing the luck and moment of him and Oliver is something he would do in any situation. Looking back on the past, he sees that if Oliver hadn’t happened to him, something or someone else would have. Thus, life is full of possibilities for happiness and passion. As much as Elio can’t imagine his life without Oliver, he only feels that way because Oliver happened to be part of his formative life stories. This quote reveals that our lives are as special as we remember them to be and that anything can happen or not happen.

“ Writing to him about her was like crossing the last footbridge between us, especially after it became clear we weren’t ever going to mention what had once existed between us, or, for that matter, that we weren’t even mentioning it.

Vimini is a symbolic bridge between Oliver and Elio. She is a thread that connects them because her death emphasizes the importance of living in the moment because life is fleeting. For a time directly after their relationship, Elio and Oliver stay in contact but don’t talk about their relationship. In this more sensitive time, when emotions are still raw but life has moved on, Oliver and Elio seek out other things to discuss so they can pretend they are still communicating with each other.

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”

In reflecting on his youth, Elio realizes that suffering might not come from getting older, but from having enough time between youth and old age to project sentimentality onto youth. We don’t see the past as it is but as we idolize it in our older age. Thus, the idea that youth dissipates and makes people unhappy is a fallacy; it is simply the way we treat our own youth and age that makes people unhappy.

“Every time I go back to Rome, I go back to that one spot. It is still alive for me, still resounds with something totally present, as though a heart stolen from a tale by Poe still throbbed under the ancient slate pavement to remind me that, here, I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have.”

In Elio’s foray into his youth, he dissects his happiness by returning to a spot that holds a vivid memory. He does this as a form of self-castigation as well because the memory makes him feel like a failure. Elio sees his goals in Rome as unfulfilled, but this is just another example of projecting the present onto the past. Elio, so good at living in the moment, can’t help but explore his youth for signs of what could have been or might have changed. Living in the hypothetical is a sign of older age.

“They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.”

This quote emphasizes Aciman’s message that dissecting the past is unnecessary and takes you away from the present. Dissection of the past also warps memories of that past. Rather than think about what could have been, Aciman encourages his reader to remember the past with fondness and live wholly in the moment of the present. Because anything could have happened in the past, “going back is false.”