Bulldog in the Backyard: Noir Paths of Tragic Deviation Between Giovanni’s Room and its Adaptation

In contemporary culture, dominated by cinematic and audiovisual forms, adaptation has become a central mode of storytelling. As theorized by Linda Hutcheon, adaptation is not merely a transfer of content between media, but an act of “interpretive creation” capable of illuminating latent dimensions of a work and actualizing narrative potentials not fully explored in its original form. In this sense, adaptation functions as both (re)interpretation and (re)creation, generating new insights into the structures of both literary and cinematic narratives. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) offers a particularly compelling case for such inquiry. While the novel has widely been discussed in relation to its thematic concerns, its narrative architecture has not been fully examined in structural terms. This thesis argues that Giovanni’s Room can be understood as a latent Noir tragedy: a narrative shaped by tragic logic and deeply contaminated by Noir sensibility. Furthermore, building on J. P. Telotte’s insight on Noir as a “field of deviation” reflecting the condition of contemporary man and society, this study shows that the novel performs a sustained commentary on the American character, exposing its failure of innocence and its problematic relation to freedom, with particular emphasis on the Jamesian dimension of the American in Europe. The project is articulated in three chapters. The first establishes the theoretical framework of Noir tragedy by defining the moral and formal architecture of Noir and the dramaturgical pattern of tragic plot. The second chapter turns to Giovanni’s Room, reading David’s trajectory as a failed coming of age, uncovering the novel’s broader commentary on the failure of White America, and examining its deep contamination by Noir sensibility. Finally, the third chapter discusses the original screenplay adaptation, Bulldog in the Backyard, as a creative and critical extension of this analysis. The chapter shows how the adaptation radicalizes the novel’s narrative mechanism, transforming its failure of innocence into a contemporary failure of responsibility, broadens Baldwin’s discourse on the American character, and fully realizes the novel’s latent Noir potential in the form of a tragically inflected Neo-Noir.