The mystery of Holly

Jack Breene

Creative Writing

Breakfast at Tiffany’s Response

            In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the idea of character is most prominently displayed via Holly. From the moment we meet her, or even before when the narrator and Joe Bell are reminiscing about her, we know that Holly is a flamboyant character. Beautiful, friendly, and affectionate; at first glance Holly is everyman’s fantasy. Before she even appears in the story we learn that the bartender Joe Bell, couldn’t help but fall in love with her.

            However, as “Fred “ soon learns, there is much more than meets the eye of this beautiful party girl.  While the narrator was suspicious of Holly from the moment he met her, she was in the process of getting rid of man she had led on to get a meal for her and a few friends, but the more characters, most of whom truly are characters, the more and more the narrator begins to suspect that Holly may not be as sincere in her friendly, bimbo act as he had once thought. At a party Holly throws at her apartment, Fred meets Holly’s agent, O.J., and he nurtures Fred’s doubts further by proposing that Holly is in fact a phony. In a story her being transformed from a hick, or Okie as OJ puts it, to what her present cosmopolitan persona, the narrator learns that Holly tends to do whatever she pleases, the story ends with Holly abandoning her acting/modeling career due to an impulsive visit to New York , that she uses her looks and charisma to get away with everything, which  is shown when she uses the promise of  letting her neighbor take her picture to avoid immediate trouble. Fred also learns that Holly only seems interested in men if they have money, “50 dollars for the powder room” as she puts it, and that her next victim in the wealthy Rusty Trawler.    

             As the narrator start spending more time together, he falls under her spell as many men before him had. The narrator finds her and her lifestyle fascinating but has as much trouble as all the others in wooing Holly. Holly constantly tells her admirers that she is too wild to love and that the more you love something wild, the stronger it becomes until it can fly away into the sky. “When you love something wild,” she says, “you end up looking into the sky.” In the end, the narrator doesn’t think Holly is a phony because, like OJ Berman always says, she really believes what she believes.   

            I found Holly to be a very interesting character. Like everyone else in the story, I found myself completely enthralled in her bizarre life and every new twist; her secret family and husband, her relationship with Tomato, her zany attitude, to name a few. Holly is great character because so much of her history and true self is covered in doubt, the reader is left guessing at every turn.