Going Lightly

Holly Golightly is an iconic character, and rightfully so—she is the manic pixie dream girl so often idolized, even today, with her intriguing past and specific way of seeing the world. Even her name—“Holiday Golightly”—is symbolic of the way she chooses to experience her surroundings.

                On page 30, O.J. Berman describes Holly gruffly. “She’s such a goddamn liar, maybe she don’t know herself anymore.” On more than one account, Holly is described as being a phony, but a “real” phony. She, presumably, believes all the lies she tells about herself, and through that image, she has constructed the character of Holly Golightly. And, after so long, that’s as much who she is as she was once Lulamae Barnes. They are, in their own ways, two individuals who, by the end of the novel, have combined to create the definitive Holly Golightly—the anguished Holly Golightly, who has managed to lose everything except her vivacious spark.

                One of the most striking things about Holly’s character was how well she was described: she was truly shown to the audience, not told. One of the most admirable skills of a writer, in character construction, is the ability to tell who a character is through their interactions with others. With the book being told from the viewpoint of an unnamed narrator, we never see into Holly’s head. We only see how she reacts, and the effects she has on other people. There is a natural bias, with the narrator’s feelings and interest, but nevertheless, only so much can be left up to subjectivity when almost every character offers the same account by different moralities.

                On the topic of the narrator’s feelings toward Holly, that’s another thing I find interesting: he loved her, yes. That much is without doubt. However, as compared to the distinctly sexual romance between Holly and other characters in the rest of the novella, the narrator’s love seems purely platonic. He isn’t objectifying Holly, but he has taken her—who she is as a concept—and made her into something that he wants to pin down but can’t. His love for her is not romantic, and he shows no more signs of physical attraction to her than he does anyone else in the novel.

                The narrator’s interest in Holly is spiritual, almost: though the novella does open with him saying that he wouldn’t have thought to write about her, implying that his interest has faded over the years, it borders on obsession in the “present-day” narrative. Even though the way he speaks of her is distant and storylike, his attentiveness says volumes about who Holly Golightly is to him, and therefore, who she becomes to us.