Analyzing Breakfast at Tiffany's: love, stability versus freedom, nature vs. culture, art as commodity

This morning  I read an analysis of Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Major themes

• Stability vs. Freedom 
• The psychological struggle between the need for stability and the desire for freedom is perhaps the central concern of Breakfast at Tiffany's.
• Holly assumes the name "Holiday Golightly", which encapsulates her strategy of avoiding stability by making a holiday out of life, and abandoning relationships and responsibilities when they threaten to jeopardize her freedom.
• Her fantasy that one day she will have, "breakfast at Tiffany's," an absurdity since Tiffany's does not serve food, indicates her choice to avoid stability by casting it in the unattainable ideals of fantasy.
• ...Breakfast at Tiffany's suggests that both characters' pathologies stem from the sense of social exclusion common to people whose lifestyles do not conform to American convention...Holly and the narrator are similar insofar as for both of them, "home" has become a charged object of fantasy and longing.
• Pathologically anxious about being restrained by relationships or even a stable lifestyle, convinced that she belongs to no one and nothing, Holly's fear of the cage represents her fear of being imprisoned by others. That Holly's dislike of cages is introduced in Section 6, which explores Holly's deceptive nature, is important. By aligning examples of deception with images of imprisonment, Capote suggests that Holly's "phoniness" is a defense against making herself vulnerable to others, and hence, to the "cage" of an authentic relationship.
• Fred appears to symbolize Holly's sense of freedom; a recurrent fantasy of hers was that the two of them would escape to Mexico, where they would raise horses. Accordingly, at Fred's death, Holly allows Jose to move in, thus "caging" her in her own apartment. She transforms herself into an "un-Holly-like" version of a stable, domestic housewife. She furnishes her apartment - something she claimed she wouldn't do until she felt she "belonged" - and stops dying her signature multi-colored hair. She becomes pregnant and attempts to learn cooking and Portuguese. She repeats to the narrator that she is happy and that she loves Jose, claims that appear too emphatic to be entirely sincere.
• The disjunction here between Holly's thoughts and reality indicates that, unlike her role as a socialite, "domestic wife" is a fictional part that Holly plays badly.
• This remark is provoked by a sudden anger at his feeling "left out - a tugboat in dry dock while she, glittery voyager of secure destination, steamed down the harbor." The narrator recognizes his perpetual feeling of exclusion is, like a boat moored to a dock, holding him back. However, he does not take direct action to change this quality.
• Section 17 also contains arguably the most memorable - and important - episode in Breakfast at Tiffany's: Holly's abandonment of her unnamed cat and her subsequent bout of remorse. Leaving the cat on a Spanish Harlem street, Holly intends to act nonchalantly about discarding the cat but soon becomes frantic, overeager to be rid of him. She tells the cat to "beat it" and "fuck off" and urges the driver to speed away from the street where she has left him. When the narrator expresses his disgust at this callous act, Holly explains again that she and the cat "never belonged to each other" and that they were both "independents". Nevertheless, her affection for the cat indicated that Holly's attitude toward the animal was ambivalent: while they were both "independents", they shared a home and a relationship. In fact, throughout the novella, the cat is the only consistent presence in Holly's life. By rejecting the animal completely, Holly indicates that she is again unwilling to accept a close relationship and to let something "belong" to her.In previous sections and in her monologue in section 17, Holly indicates that she views her cat as she views herself, an essentially homeless, independent wanderer without a proper name or family. Her cruelty toward the animal thus appears to dramatize Holly's self-destructive tendencies: she acts out her anger and fear on the animal she sees as a figure for herself. Moreover, Holly's abandonment of the cat repeats her own rejection at the hands of her parents, friends, and, most recently, Jose.However, Holly's change of heart, which inspires her to tears and sends her searching for the cat in the rain suggests there is hope for her character. Realizing that she and the cat "did belong to each other...he was mine", Holly admits that no tragedy in her life had been as frightening as "not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away." This confession presents Holly in her most genuine, honest moment in the novella, and marks the climax of her relationship with the narrator. She admits vulnerability and love for her cat and a need for a relationship in which there is mutual belonging. Strikingly, Holly confesses that both the "mean reds" and the "fat woman" are "nothing," dismissing her usual evasive metaphors for grief in favor of directly admitting her sadness.
• The concluding section of Breakfast at Tiffany's resolves several plot threads while leaving others open-ended. The novella returns to the frame narrative, which focuses on the question of Holly's presence in Africa. Speaking in the present, the narrator quotes from newspaper articles that documented Holly's discovery in Rio, which fortunately did not lead to another indictment. The death of Sally Tomato severs Holly's ties to the criminal case against her and the gossip surrounding her slowly dies down, resolving the plotline of Holly as a refugee. The plot thread that focused on Holly's personal struggle with identity and belonging, however, is left unresolved. The narrator reveals that while Holly wrote him soon after her escape, she had yet to find a permanent address. As he never heard from her again, he assumes that she either never found this address, or forgot about him. This turn of events refutes those of the previous section, which suggested that Holly was on the brink of a positive personal transformation. While she had recognized and acknowledged her need to love and be loved, Holly's postcard informs the narrator that she has returned to her old ways, using men for their money, unable and unwilling to find a stable home. That she did not stay in touch with the narrator retroactively casts a negative light on their friendship, and suggests that perhaps her feelings for him were not as strong as they had appeared.Despite the rather negative ending to Holly's tale, the conclusion of the novella is positive in tone. The narrator relates that a young man named Quaintance Smith moved into Holly's apartment, where he entertained as many male visitors as Holly without the judgment of Sapphia Spanella. The mention of his many "gentleman callers", along with the name "Quaintance" - a reference to George Quaintance, a painter of the 1940s and 1950s whose art was overtly homosexual in content - suggest that the new tenant is gay, practicing an unorthodox lifestyle that links him symbolically with both Holly and the narrator and extends the novella's theme of community between sexual outsiders beyond Holly's departure.The most positive aspect of the novella's ending, however, is that we learn that the narrator has maintained warm feelings toward his old friend. He keeps his promise to her and searches Spanish Harlem for her cat, which he sees behind the window of a homey-looking room. He muses that, along with a home, the cat likely has a name; he is "certain he'd arrived somewhere he belonged." A home and a name were, for Holly, the two signifiers of belonging, and the narrator hopes that Holly has achieved the same things. This sentiment demonstrates the narrator's continued affection for Holly even in her absence. That the novella concludes by exploring his warmth for Holly suggests that the novella was less about Holly than about how loving her transformed the narrator's own life.
• Naming as Identification 
• ...within the world of the novella, proper names symbolize both personal and public identity.
• Holly's use of a pseudonym and her reluctance to confer a name on her cat are thus symptoms of her general rejection of stability. She refuses to take or give a fixed identity until she feels at home in the world.
• Not only does the narrator learn of the poverty and abuse of Holly's childhood, which explains her perpetual sense of homelessness, but he also learns her real name - Lulamae Barnes - which no one else seems to know.
• Rebirth
• The motif of Christmas appears to be most linked to Holly, as her two pseudonyms - Holiday and Holly - are references to the "holy day" and the traditional plant of Christmas, respectively.
• Holly's narrative presents her as "re-born" into different personae and attitudes at several key points that correspond to Christmas. The gift exchange (1943) confirms her presence in the narrator's life, Sally's death (1944) severs her connection to New York and thus the narrator, and the discovery of the carving (1956) marks Holly's final transformation into an art object that inspires the narrator's own art: the written narrative that is Breakfast at Tiffany's.
• The Diversity of Love
• At the heart of Breakfast at Tiffany's is an exploration of the diverse kinds of love that define, enrich, and at times destroy adult relationships.
• Capote suggests non-romantic relationships are not superior because they lack sex, but because they are not based on need or desire.
• Breakfast at Tiffany's juxtaposes love and desire, drawing a sharp contrast between Holly's relationships governed by desire, and her relationships free from it.
• Her arrangements with Rusty Trawler, Jose, Mag, and Berman appear quite different, but all are based on need. Jose desires Holly sexually, Rusty needs Holly to fulfill his quasi-sexual infantile complex, Mag desires to share Holly's social contacts and apartment, and Berman seeks to profit from Holly's potential as an actress. 
• Conversely, Holly desires what these people can offer her in return, be it money, professional contacts, or merely help around her apartment. 
• While such relationships appear solid, all crumble, more or less, when Holly is incarcerated and no longer able to fulfill her companions' desires.
• Demonstrating the sincerity of the bond between a straight woman and two gay men, Breakfast at Tiffany's implicitly questions the narrow definition of love as heterosexual romance that is as dominant now as it was in 1950s America.
• While Holly had described her bouts of the "mean reds", her behavior throughout the novella is remarkably upbeat and nonchalant, illustrating her minimal personal investment in her relationships. However, her rage at Fred's death indicates that her attachment to her brother was quite real and strong. The extremity of Holly's despair further suggests why she avoids permanent relationships, as her experience of pain is apparently intense and self-destructive. Avoiding real attachments is perhaps Holly's way to protect herself against the kind of pain she feels at her brother's death.
• ...the narrator is overcome with love for Holly, and realizes that his desire for her happiness is greater than his own need to keep her with him.
• As Holly and the narrator ride alongside each other, they both experience an exhilarating high, and, seeing Holly's happiness, realizes that he loves her so much that he values her happiness above his own, even if that means the end of their friendship.
• Nature vs. Culture  
• Holly identifies with nature - wild, untamed, and unknowable - over the structured, convention-bound world of human culture.
• Animals, both wild and domestic, symbolize Holly's rejection of social convention.
• The cage, a symbol of the human imprisonment of nature, remains an object of anxiety for Holly throughout the novel, and she refuses to even look at animals in the zoo.
• While Holly considers herself a "wild thing", inherently unsuited to the rules that govern human culture, it appears that this is, at least in part, a facade. 
• Holly is more than willing to be domesticated when she is offered the right price, and settles down more or less happily with the wealthy Jose. 
• Her reliance on fine things and entertainment, and her worship of Tiffany's, a near-universal symbol of New York capitalist excess, indicates that Holly's appetites are not those of an animal, but a woman remarkably invested in the products of American culture.
•  This ambivalence is suggested by another recurring animal motif: horses. 
• The horse is a long-established figure for human control over nature and animal instinct; for Holly, horses appear to represent her control over men. 
• Her first boyfriend after running away from Doc is a horse jockey, she keeps volumes of books about horses on her bookshelf as "research" for her involvements with male suitors, and she fantasizes about running off to Mexico, where she plans to train horses with her brother Fred. 
• She marks the end of her friendship with the narrator with a horseback ride, in which she demonstrates her skill as a rider. 
• In each case, Holly has emotional or sexual control over the male character in the episode. 
• When the narrator's bolts and runs away wildly, it prefigures Holly's loss of Jose when she is arrested later that day. 
• While Holly associates herself with nature and the "wild things" she identifies with, the novella presents Holly in a more complex relationship with the natural world. 
• In her relationships with men, she acts the part of both wild animal and trainer, achieving emotional and sexual control over her male admirers while evading responsibility and commitment.
• Through the dialogue between Holly and Mag, a "very conventional person", the reader's sense of Holly's unorthodox nature is heightened. Mag's embarrassment at discussing sex, her confessed sexual passivity (she prefers to leave the lights off during sex), and blind patriotism stand in sharp contrast to Holly's candor, sexual assertiveness (she states boldly that "men are beautiful"), and indifference toward her home country, a dangerous sentiment during the heightened patriotism of war time America. Holly's statement that she would "rather be natural" than normal indicates another recurring concern of the novel: that definitions of what is "normal" are arbitrary, and serve to control and restrain the natural freedom of the human spirit.
• As the narrator observes Holly in the library, he is reminded of another girl he once knew: the practical, introverted Mildred Grossman. He conveys that the two women were opposites: Mildred a "top-heavy realist" and Holly a "lopsided romantic". Through his comparison, the narrator reveals his account of human personality. While he believes that most people are malleable, their nature fluid and ever shifting, both Mildred and Holly were unchanging, their distinct personalities formed early and thus becoming unalterable. This is a provocative observation when we consider that Holly's identity is pathologically unstable and almost completely fraudulent. By suggesting that Holly's basic character was complete and unchanging, the narrator illuminates Berman's claim that Holly is a "real phony". Holly's fraudulence and instability is perhaps not a cover, but her true nature; her "phoniness" is a very real, essential part of her basic character.
• She confesses that while she never intended to return to Texas with Doc, she slept with him the night before, since he gave her confidence as a child, and "anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot." She explains that she took him to the bus station that morning, and, as they were saying goodbye, she realized that was still Lulamae, "stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch.""Never love a wild thing," Holly tells Joe. She explains that Doc was always nurturing wild animals, and that the more love he gave them, the stronger they became. Drunkenly, Holly states that "if you let yourself love a wild thing...[you'll] end up looking at the sky." Realizing that her husband must be back in Texas already, Holly invites the narrator to join her in a toast to Doc.
• Holly's drunken monologue in Joe's bar is one of the novella's famous passages. It gives the reader further insight into the initial attraction between Doc and the young Holly. She explains that Doc was "always hauling home wild things...a hawk with a hurt wing...a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg." He loved to nurture and nurse these animals, despite the fact they only abandoned him once they were back to health. "Never love a wild thing," Holly warns Joe, "[you'll] end up looking at the sky." Holly, a starving and homeless child when Doc adopted her, is thus aligned with the wild animals he also loved. Considering herself a "wild thing", she indicates that she believes that, like an animal, she is inherently untamable, and that it is her essential nature to run away from those who love her. In this way, Holly admits to her fear of commitment while suggesting that, like an animal, she is not responsible for her behavior. Directing her warning at Joe, Holly subtly indicates that he should prepare to be hurt when she inevitably leaves her life in New York.
• As during the escape from Woolworth's, the narrator challenges his own boundaries and breaks habit by engaging in one of Holly's typically "carefree" activities. His pure happiness during both the theft and the horseback ride indicates that Holly's unconventional and spontaneous attitude is what is missing from the narrator's own life, and suggests that his attachment to Holly is partly a wish to become more like her.
• A central concern of Breakfast at Tiffany's is the impossibility of objectivity. Lies, gossip, and stories, all claiming to be true, play crucial roles in transmitting information between characters and shaping how they think about others and themselves. By quoting at length from the newspaper coverage of Holly's arrest, Capote demonstrates that even the purportedly "objective" information of the newspaper is itself prone to the same kind of errors, exaggerations, and biases as the "fictional" stories he writes, and the "fraudulent" tales Holly tells. For example, the narrator explains, Holly was arrested in his bathroom, yet the articles claim that she was found in her "glamorous apartment." The press distorts reality for its own purposes, as does Holly and, perhaps, the narrator itself. This section suggests that story telling is inherently subjective.
• The loyalty of Joe and the narrator in this section validates the relationships between gay men and women, demonstrating the strength of love that is not founded on sexual or financial need.
• Section 16, set in the hospital where Holly is recovering from her miscarriage, explores Holly's pathology in depth. Unable to discuss her sadness and fear directly, she invents another metaphor, the "fat woman", to explain her depression to the narrator. She confides that it was the "fat woman" who had overtaken her after Fred's death, and asks, "[now] do you see why I went crazy and broke everything?" Holly also defends herself against sadness with physical artifice, readying herself for Jose's letter by applying meticulous makeup, jewelry, and her signature dark glasses. As she transforms herself, the narrator notices that her child-like appearance hardens and she appears "armored." The makeup symbolizes Holly's constant attempts to "armor", or protect herself against emotion by assuming different, artificial identities. The presence of three Italian women in the hospital room, none of whom can understand English and who seem to misinterpret the narrator as Holly's lover, are figures for the external world in which Holly feels perpetually misunderstood.
• Art as Commodity 
• Holly is the novella's major symbol for art. 
• Holly, a fictional person of her own making, is a woman who sells her time, affections, and even her body for money. 
• She views herself as a commodity, as something that can and should be bought and sold. 
• She is art as a commodity, and she extends this reasoning to the narrator's writing.
• Her persona is entirely self-constructed. 
• Even her signature appearance is, as the narrator discovers, the result of deliberate artifice. 
• Her hair is dyed, she diets, and conceals her poor eyesight with stylish dark glasses. 
• Aside from concealing her true identity, Holly's self-fashioning implies that she sees herself an artificial object, an art work of her own creation. 
• It is this artificial persona that the wealthy men in Holly's life pay for, establishing Holly as not only an art object, but as one that is sold as a commodity in the sexual marketplace. 
• The narrator's disgust at Holly's plea for him to "make money" is thus an expression of his larger dilemma as an artist whose position in mass-consumer society is precarious. Holly, a commodity herself, represents the pressure of commercial society upon artists to abandon their ideological and aesthetic ideals in favor of economic profit.
• Information and storytelling
• ...the reader is compelled to read Breakfast at Tiffany's not as a story about Holly, but as a story about the narrator and his investment in their friendship.