Go Tell it on the Mountain is concerned with the initiation of John Grimes, a fourteen year-old Negro boy. He is exposed to the bitter realities of ghetto life and sees at first hand the consequences of the resulting tensions in terms of individual lives. In the course of the book he undergoes what is apparently a profound religious conversion—a conversion which seems to reconcile him with his situation….

But his conversion does not represent an acknowledgment of religious truth or an acceptance of his father's bitterness or his mother's passivity. It is a desperate expression of his own need for love and his desire for a sense of identity and common brotherhood. Yet his own mixed motives create a difficulty for the reader which is reflected throughout Baldwin's work. The central ambiguity of the book arises from the confusion between Eros and Agape. John's conversion is not the result of spiritual revelation but of a homosexual attraction which he feels for Elisha, a young Negro convert…. While setting out to establish the desirability and viability of compassion, Baldwin can only visualize this love in terms of sexual alliances, more particularly in terms of homosexual relationships. The physical is made to stand for the metaphysical but the intensity of the sexual relationship subverts its symbolic effectiveness. Throughout his work it is the homosexual, virtually alone, who can offer a selfless and genuine love because he alone has a real sense of himself, having accepted his own nature. Yet while Baldwin is clearly suggesting that the acknowledgment of one's true identity is the key to a constructive life his overly sentimental approach to the homosexual relationship destroys its utility as an image.

The real core of the book is the struggle between hatred and love which Baldwin sees as the major battle to be fought by Black and White alike. The fight in essence is that between the Old and New Testaments; between retribution and love, the father and the son, servitude and freedom. (p. 236)

The most bitter characters, Gabriel, his son Roy and Elizabeth's lover, Richard, are all destroyed by hatred, as are similar characters throughout his work. Salvation it seems lies only through suffering and compassion…. (pp. 236-37)

Baldwin's central theme is the need to accept reality as a necessary foundation for individual identity and thus a logical prerequisite for the kind of saving love in which he places his whole faith. For some this reality is one's racial or sexual nature, for others it is the ineluctable fact of death. Like Edward Albee, Baldwin sees this simple progression as an urgent formula not only for the redemption of individual men but for the survival of mankind. In this at least black and white are as one and the Negro's much-vaunted search for identity can be seen as part and parcel of the American's long-standing need for self-definition. It is a theme which runs through Baldwin's work but nowhere is it stated more directly than in the much misunderstood Giovanni's Room.

Baldwin has said that "a writer who is bi-sexual is probably but not surely going to identify himself with other minorities," and in many ways this gives us some clue as to his intention in his second novel. Giovanni's Room is ostensibly about a homosexual relationship and yet we have Baldwin's somewhat baffling assurance that the novel is "not about homosexuality." The book is concerned with the protagonist's refusal to confront his own bi-sexuality. Having had a brief affair with a young Italian boy, David, an expatriate American, tries to return to the 'normality' of a relationship with his fiancée. In the name of some intangible standard of respectability and in retreat from that element of his nature which seems to make him the victim of his own irrational desires and the equally irrational contempt of others, he callously sacrifices a genuine relationship to one which has the sanction of society. In evading the truth he succeeds only in destroying himself and those he loves. The relevance of this to Baldwin's racial as well as sexual predicament hardly needs underlining. Both were aspects of a personal reality which he had struggled to avoid, but which he had finally come to accept as the substance of his own identity. Thus the predicament of the homosexual, on the fringe of society, regarded with suspicion and prejudice by others, becomes in Baldwin's mind, an appropriate image of those similarly estranged. Therefore, when Baldwin says of homosexuality in America that "if people were not so frightened of it … it really would cease in effect … to exist. I mean in the same way the Negro problem would disappear," it is no accident that the two ideas should appear so closely related. Similarly, when the protagonist of the novel remarks that "I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me" and admits that he has "succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion" we are reminded of the author who fled to Paris in order to escape his racial identity and the consequences of that identity. (pp. 237-38)

Baldwin's is an uneven talent. For all the measured articulateness of the essays his rhetoric can get hopelessly out of control in the novels…. But in spite of this and his unconquerable sentimentality he remains a writer of considerable power and surely one of the most significant American writers to emerge during the 50s. (pp. 239-40)