Call Me By Your Name

Oliver is the secondary protagonist of Call Me By Your Name. He is a 24-year-old American scholar with an outgoing personality and handsome looks. Everyone takes a liking to him when he arrives in Italy for his summer workshop with Elio’s father. He is outgoing, charming, and full of laughter. Oliver exudes confidence but is not without his own insecurities. He is easily annoyed by people whose behavior he subconsciously recognizes as his own.

He, like Elio, spends weeks desiring Elio without saying anything. Oliver’s age relative to Elio’s positions Oliver as more experienced and, therefore, more powerful. Indeed, when they first have sex, Oliver takes the lead and shows Elio how to have sex with a fellow man. But Oliver and Elio’s relationship is equitable because they both give and receive one another. As a lover, Oliver is sexual, romantic, intelligent, and full of fun. His role in Elio’s life is formative. But Oliver’s life is much more conventional than Elio’s. He notes that his father, unlike Elio’s father, would not approve of his relationship with Elio. Oliver faces pressure to be more heteronormative. Though he settles down with a woman, Aciman implies throughout the novel that Oliver has a greater desire for men.  

In the second part of the novel, the reader is reintroduced to Oliver well into his adulthood. His life has become tidy; he has a stable job as a professor, and he has a wife, a house, and two teenage sons. It is clear that Oliver, like Elio, still thinks about his youthful, passionate adventures in Italy. Oliver has kept Elio’s postcard of Monet’s berm as a constant reminder of what had happened when Oliver was more willing to give in to love and risk heteronormativity for passion. In rehashing the past with Elio, Oliver notes that he wouldn’t want to think about his own teenage sons in a relationship with someone like Elio, implying that Oliver wants to think of his relationship with Elio as unique and special to who they were at that time.

Elio notes that adult Oliver is still trim and handsome, which reveals that the physicality of Elio’s memories is not far off from his present reality. Oliver, on the other hand, sees Elio as changed. Elio grows a beard, which differentiates his adult self from the version of Elio that Oliver first fell in love with, when Elio was on the brink of maturing into adulthood. Notably, the lack of physical discrepancies between who they were and who they are emphasizes Aciman’s message that people don’t fundamentally change, but the way they structure their lives changes as they seek more security as they get older.

As an adult, Oliver doesn’t speak much about his wife other than to confirm her presence in his life. This implies that Oliver is either not in love with her, or that he doesn’t want Elio to dwell on the possibility of Oliver’s parallel life. Oliver decides to think of his life as two parallel possibilities, implying that he has thought about what his life would have been like with Elio, a possibility that he shut down because of his father’s intolerance toward gay people. Throughout the novel, Oliver develops from a rambunctious and risk-loving young man into an older man who plays the game of safe respectability.

Marzia is a teenage girl in B. with whom Elio starts a relationship over the summer. While Elio has sex with Oliver, he continues his sexual friendship with Marzia. It is clear that Marzia likes Elio a lot more than he likes her, but her role as a secondary lover is to help Elio in his sexual awakening. Through his relationship with Marzia, Elio learns more about what he does and doesn’t want, and he has an opportunity to try things out with Marzia. Though Elio doesn’t want to use her, he ends up continuing his relationship with her simply to play around with his own emotions and sexual boundaries. Marzia represents another potential risk of love: unreciprocated love. From Marzia’s point-of-view, Elio is interested in her but not enough. This demonstrates that being vulnerable and open with other people can lead to disappointment.

Mr. Pearlman is Elio’s father. He is a scholar who hosts and mentors younger scholars working on academic manuscripts. Mr. Pearlman is not the archetype of the stuffy academic, however; he is very liberal, open-minded, and interested in the risks of life. He encourages his son to fall wildly in love, to have sex, and to be open about what he wants from life. The relationship Elio has with his father is formative in his character development. Elio grows up in a household that is accepting and indeed pushes him to live with risk. This environment helps Elio explore his sexuality and accept his love for Oliver as inherently good. A conversation between Elio and his father in Part 4 reveals that Elio’s father knew about Oliver and Elio. Without embarrassing his son or invading his personal space, Mr. Pearlman makes it clear to his son that love is important, sex is good, and the pain that accompanies love only means that you’re living life to the fullest.