Holly Golightly!

Jei Woo

Until recently, I had never actually directly experienced the character of Holly Golightly. The famous image of Audrey Hepburn in character is everywhere you see, and even if you didn’t know which film it was from, you would always be able to recognize that distinct image: the extended cigarette holder, the necklace of diamonds and those breathtaking eyes.

It is not hard to understand why a character like Holly Golightly has attained such cult status in the U.S. and perhaps internationally. Though the character of Holly herself is incredibly attractive and complex in its own nature, the way Truman Capote first introduces Holly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and develops her throughout the lens of “Fred” contributes great amounts to the mystery of Holly that is so electric and compelling. Capote begins the book with recollections of Holly Golightly and how he is writing because of certain events that have evoked the memory of her. In that notion alone, Capote subtly suggests that Holly is a memory worth remembering. For the next few pages, the reader discovers that Joe Bell, the bartender that works around the corner, is infatuated with Holly. At this point, one questions the reasoning behind the fascination behind Holly; perhaps she is an incredibly beautiful woman and has voluptuous features. However, Capote develops her even more, making Holly seem like, at least to me, the most interesting woman in the world: she brings home man after man in the wee hours of the night, she sings songs and plays guitar, and she is only as old as 19. The most important feature of Capote’s writing with respect to his character development of Holly is the fact that the reader begins to learn about (or fall in love with) Holly through the experience of Fred, the narrator. We act like the boy in the back of class who falls in love with the girl in the front of the class and doesn’t have the guts to talk to her, so instead he watches her from far away; Fred listens to her conversations in the stairwell with other tenants or peers at her from the banister where she cannot see him. For a while we do not fully experience Holly until that fateful night when she climbs into his room, and that is the most attractive thing about it. We want to know more.

            In addition to Holly, Capote’s prose is saturated with the most incredible descriptions of peoples and animals: “…it was a grim cat with a pirate’s cutthroat face; one eye was gluey-blind, the other sparkled with dark deeds” (33). At first it seems odd that Capote would liken a domestic cat to the face of a pirate, but it works so well. His description of Rusty Trawler is stunning as well. Capote describes Rusty’s face as having a “virginal quality: it was as if he’d been born, then expanded…” (34). The character of Rusty would have been so much more boring if he had been an incredibly handsome man; his character, though attractive, would’ve been too generic. Instead, the incredibly wealthy bachelor instead likens to a big baby.