Breakfast At Tiffany's: Some Real Characters

     The genius of Truman Capote’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s lies less in its structured plot line than in the vivid and enticing characters who dot its path. There is the incarcerated gangster, the imperfect model, the ironic Latin diplomat, the self-regarding agent, the sturdy bartender—not to mention the ubiquitous rich men—and then there is the narrator, who goes unnamed until he is given not only title but purpose by the one for whom all the others seem to exist: Miss Holiday Golightly. Holly herself should fill a certain archetype as well—that of the cafe society playgirl—but it somehow doesn’t fit her. She’s the call girl whose opportunity for redemption permeates the the prose through her wit, her complexity and her surprising emotional depth.

     While the characters seem to revolve around Holly, they do serve something more than decoration—they define her presence as much as she defines theirs. We are shown her past through Doc Golightly, her adoring husband to whom she was a child-bride; O.J. Berman, the agent to the career she never had, who transformed her from “an Okie or a hillbilly or what” to the sleek, stylish character she has now occupied; then there is the trail of rich older men, whose relationship with Holly is colored with irony, as the are nearly stripped of identity as they uniquely lend to shaping Holly’s. 

     Capote’s masterful prose comes at characters from surprising and evocative angles, revealing details about their nature through seemingly extraneous disclosure. Of Joe Bell, he describes him as someone who “hasn’t an easy nature...it’s because he’s a bachelor and has a sour stomach.” Or Doc Golightly, whose most defining characteristic is his “sweat-stained hat.” Yet, through their dialogue, Capote reveals nuances to these characters that perhaps would not be as evident in description. 

     O.J. Berman describes Holly as being both “a phony” and not “a phony because she’s a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes.” I think it is within these contradictions that Holly’s intrigue lies. Berman goes on to say, “you can beat your brains out for her, and she’ll hand you horse shit on a platter.” It makes one wonder about Holly’s motivations and preoccupations. She seems to dismiss all these people as fleeting, and yet it is obvious that she develops feelings deeper than surface level for the narrator, even if they are platonic. Perhaps it all returns to her brother Fred, “the only one that ever let me hug him on a cold night.” Her deep affection for her lost brother reveals an emotional capacity to Holly that can account for how broken we find that she ultimately is. She can’t cant find a home and any sense of belonging and in a way that satisfies something in all of us. While it may not be as colorful or erratic as Holly’s, there is that inner journey that we all embark on to find who we really are.