Breakfast at Tiffany’s: a review

A book review (contains spoilers)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, published in 1958, is a story of an unnamed narrator’s encounter with the untamed, beautiful and heart-breaking Holly Golightly, who throughout the story is trying to find herself a place to belong. It is not a romantic story, and Holly does not find her home with the narrator, whom she calls Fred after her beloved brother (evidencing their platonic – but I think a little idolising, on his side, relationship) as she frequently states that she does not want to ‘belong’ to anyone. I don’t really think that by the end of the story she has found a home in the normal sense of the word, but maybe that state of change and movement is her real home – her very elusiveness is what makes her grounded.

The story is set in Manhattan, post-war America, where Holly lives off an income of rich men’s gratitude. Holly was actually born in Texas as Lulamae Barnes – a life she is trying to escape, showing the first instance of her search for home. But her past self comes back to her in the novella, when her husband, Doc Golightly whom she married as a teenager, comes to find her. She refuses to go back to Texas with him and stays in New York, even though she doesn’t really feel at home there either. This is shown by her restless romantic life, her eventual move to Argentina, and simply by how her moving, floating and longing nature pervades the novel. She refers to herself, at the end, when she tells a bartender and the narrator that they should ‘never love a wild thing…if you let yourself love a wild thing, you’ll end up looking at the sky’. This is how she perceives herself: elusive, ‘wild’ and untouchable in a way that means she can escape from anyone and anywhere. It also foreshadows where she will end up: the ‘sky’, or far, far away from those who love her – at the end of the novella, she is in Buenos Aires, and never sends the narrator her address so he can’t keep in touch with her: he has lost her, and he is looking at the sky. Also, in showing that Holly perceives herself in this way, we see that she doesn’t really believe she is worthy of love. She is warning people against loving her, because she thinks her eventual leaving is unavoidable because of her ‘wild’ nature, which I think must be a very sad way to perceive yourself. She also seems to feel sorry for anyone who has loved her, which is again very sad, but she hides this sadness in the life she leads, which is careless, exciting and glamourous.

Holly is looking for a place to feel safe, even though her very character, her natural restlessness, means that she won’t really ever find this because she is destined to always be looking for it, and that will always be what drives her, no matter where she is. I argue this because of how she kicks out her unnamed cat at the end of the book. A cat lives with her for the whole novel and sort of seems like a roommate to Holly – they coexist comfortably but without any great care, and it is only once she and the narrator have driven away after dropping the cat in a random street that she realises how much she did care for it, and she asks Fred (we’ll call him Fred, as she does) to look for it. She says after that she is scared, because ‘it could go on forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away’ – in order for her to know she cares about something, she has to leave it, so she is destined to leave the things she loves continually and compulsively. This could therefore mean she is never able to find the safety she craves, leaving her perpetually in a state of longing. She realises this properly when she loses the cat, and I think she’s really brave for this because coming to terms with the fact that you probably won’t ever get what you fundamentally want is obviously really hard, but she manages to pick up and carry on – or at least we think she does, the last Fred and the reader hear from her being a very cheery postcard sent from Buenos Aires.

So, Holly is destined to always be looking for something she can never find, and I think Tiffany’s, the jewellery shop, symbolises this ‘something’ as well, because it both embodies her natural glamour (which itself is symbolic of her restlessness, because it is gained from her running away from her farm home in Texas), and her desire for a home. She says that ‘the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany’s. Calms me down right away…nothing very bad could happen to you there.’ So she does find what she wants – safety – in the form of Tiffany’s, but she runs away from it, as she is destined to, when she disappears to South America. Also, the fact that she takes comfort in the glamour that is symbolic of her restlessness also highlights the contradictory nature of her search for safety, because it implies that she cannot have one without the other – she needs to be restless in order to stay still, because this constant movement is in her nature. Her wants contradict her character. The title, ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, shows how Tiffany’s is her safe place because ‘breakfast’ implies something domestic, safe and familiar, since it’s found in a home, and if she is having breakfast at Tiffany’s then that is where she feels at home.

But maybe her very restlessness is where she feels most at home, because it is constant and reliable, and therefore maybe safe? If this is true, then she does get what she wants, making the story happier than I may have described it to be. It is not a tragedy, because rather than being brought down by a tragic flaw (which would be her restless wandering), she maybe eventually finds safety in it. And also, her character had a wholly good and lasting impact on the narrator, and everyone she knew, so how could someone so ultimately loved be a tragic hero?

I really liked the story because of its characters, and Capote’s brilliant characterisation, and because of its lack of romance between the male and female protagonists, which I found refreshing. It was also funny, and human, and unique in its themes, story and narration. The film is also obviously really good, although it is a little different from the book, and I would recommend both.