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Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the story of a young woman, Holly Golightly, who outwardly professes a deep need for personal freedom but privately yearns for a sense of belonging and a true home. As she navigates the café society of 1940s New York City, Holly appears to be the very image of worldly independence, but she struggles to reconcile that outward identity with her desire for authenticity and human connection. The novella explores this tension through Holly’s relationships with the varied cast of characters drawn into her social orbit. The people around her find themselves sometimes captivated, but other times offended, by her eccentricities and carefree habits. Holly is a reliable source of excitement and liberation for the men she flirts with and sometimes sleeps with, but she is not shy about inconveniencing her friends and neighbors to make her own life easier.

Read a comparison of the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s with its 1961 film version.

The story's narrator is a man who, over time, grows close to Holly. His constantly evolving opinion of her gives the reader a sense of her complexities and nuance. While the narrator actively participates in the storyline, his lack of a stated name and the absence of much detail about his own life make it easy for the reader to adopt his perspective and see Holly through his eyes. O.J. Berman’s question to the narrator at Holly’s party—whether Holly is a “phony” or not—is a question not just posed to the narrator, but to the reader as well.

Read about the life of Breakfast at Tiffany’s author Truman Capote.

Holly greatly values honesty and criticizes anyone who acts under false pretenses, even though she inhabits a milieu where this is the norm, and often behaves dishonestly herself. The ironic juxtaposition of Holly's outer persona and her inner aspirations are mirrored in the recurring image of the luxurious jewelry store Tiffany's, a place she fixates on and associates not with the glamour and excitement of her life as a socialite but with the safety and calm of an imagined, but unattainable, home. This feeling of peace is something she notes not feeling in any other place. There is a sense of irony in Holly finding such a meaningful feeling in a place that many would judge as superficial. Capote challenges the reader to look beyond the ways in which many would judge Holly as shallow and instead empathize with her, seeing Tiffany’s as a symbol of the financial security and social stability that Holly yearns for.

Read about the jewelry story Tiffany's as a symbol in the novella.

Holly’s yearning for a sense of belonging and place where she feels at home is something that the reader only sees during moments of emotional intimacy between the narrator and Holly, and during moments of emotional vulnerability the narrator bears witness to. Holly’s dream of settling down on a ranch by the sea in Mexico to raise horses with her brother Fred is one that Holly holds close to her heart, and her moment of greatest vulnerability is when she learns that Fred has died in combat and sees that dream crashing down. When she senses that she is about to lose her new dream of home (as the narrator delivers José’s letter to her), she raises her defenses in the form of putting on makeup and getting dressed up to minimize her vulnerability. In a way, it is fitting that the reader never finds out what happens to Holly, as the question of whether she has found a true home or not is one too intimate for her to share.

Read about the unusual feature of a fallible first-person narrator in the novella.

The inciting incident of the story is Holly and the narrator’s first meeting, when she seeks refuge in his apartment to escape a man who became physically aggressive. The rising action includes the revelation of an ongoing, legally dubious involvement with an imprisoned crime boss, Sally Tomato. The climax of the story comes when Holly is arrested for passing coded information from Sally to his outside confederate, Oliver O’Shaughnessy. In the ultimate thwarting of Holly’s desire for freedom, she is briefly forced into literal imprisonment. Her hope of finding a real home and a place to belong is also dashed, when her Brazilian fiancé, José Ybarra-Jaegar, breaks off their engagement rather than be caught up in her scandal. The falling action has Holly, out on bail, flee the country to escape prosecution. Since she already has a plane ticket to Brazil, that is where she goes. Shortly before leaving, Holly releases her cat in a randomly chosen neighborhood, only to regret her action immediately. The cat is integral to the resolution, which comes when the narrator discovers the feline seated comfortably on a window sill, seemingly in a happy home with a new family. The ending hints that Holly, too, might someday find a home to settle down in.

Read about the significance of names as in the novella.

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