Novella: Breakfast at Tiffany's

Overview
Truman Capote’s 1958 novella follows an unnamed writer who, years after the fact, is still haunted by his brief friendship with Holly Golightly, a dazzling, rootless young woman drifting through wartime Manhattan. Framed as a recollection triggered by a curious photograph, the story examines the myths people make of themselves, the price of independence, and the consolations of style and ritual represented by Tiffany’s glittering calm.

Framing and Setting
The narrator is tipped off by Joe Bell, a bar owner, about a photograph of a hand-carved figure found in Africa that seems to depict Holly. The sighting prompts the narrator’s memory to return to the early 1940s, when he rented a modest apartment in an East Seventies brownstone and encountered his neighbor, Holly, a nineteen-year-old with a no-name cat, a wardrobe of black dresses, and a habit of calling the writer “Fred,” after her beloved brother.

Holly’s World
Holly survives by charm, wit, and carefully maintained secrecy. She hosts impromptu parties, collects fifty-dollar “powder room” contributions from admirers, and seeks solace at Tiffany’s whenever struck by the “mean reds,” a panic deeper than sadness. She is coached in poise by O. J. Berman, a Hollywood handler who once tried to mold her for the screen. Around her orbit Rusty Trawler, a wealthy divorcee; Mag Wildwood, a lanky model with a stutter; and, eventually, José Ybarra-Jaegar, a handsome Brazilian diplomat who seems to offer the promise of legitimacy.

Past and Masks
The mask slips when Doc Golightly arrives from Texas. He is not Holly’s father but her much older husband, a kindly horse doctor who married her when she was a runaway child named Lula Mae Barnes. She had kept house and cared for his children until she fled. Doc’s plea to take her home is met with tenderness but refusal: the life she left no longer fits the identity she has created. The narrator sees in this encounter both Holly’s impulse toward caretaking and her refusal to belong to anyone, a credo she also applies to her unnamed cat, “we don’t belong to each other.”

Crisis and Scandal
All the while, Holly has been ferrying “weather reports” from Sing Sing, where she visits Sally Tomato, an aging mobster who pays her for the service. The code turns out to be tied to a narcotics scheme. After a telegram announces her brother Fred’s death in the Army, Holly unravels; soon after, police raid her apartment and arrest her as a material witness. The scandal extinguishes her engagement to José, who retreats to protect his career. With help from O. J. Berman and a lawyer, Holly is freed on bail but faces a blighted future in New York.

Departure
Resolved to flee, she packs lightly and heads for the airport. In a cab, she suddenly sets her cat loose in a Harlem alley, insisting freedom means refusing ownership. The gesture shocks even her; she bursts back into the rain to reclaim the animal, but the cat has vanished. That loss becomes a quiet acknowledgment of the costs of her creed. She boards a plane and disappears, skipping bail and leaving only a battered typewriter ribbon and a whiff of gardenia as evidence she was there.

Aftermath and Resonance
Years later, rumors place Holly in South America and Africa, still improvising a life. The carved figure that resembles her, fine-boned, head tilted, a cat at her feet, suggests she has been, once again, briefly seen and then gone. The narrator’s memory fixes her as a symbol of incandescent self-invention and lonely flight, a woman forever seeking a place where the mean reds cannot reach her, a window-lit vitrine of calm like Tiffany’s, just out of time and touch.