Breakfast at Tiffany's

“Dead. Or in a crazy house. Or married. I think she's married and quieted down and maybe right in this very city.”

The narrator speculates on where Holly might be. For years, she had denied him a neat end to her story and he is forced to invent wildly different versions of a potential resolution for this narrative. Even if she was in the same city and did not contact the narrator, he would prefer this to not knowing. He chooses to believe her story has an ending as he needs the comfort and neatness that this would provide.

“The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically.”

The narrator's understanding of Holly's lifestyle is made deliberately vague. He observes her relationship with men from a distance but he does not object on moral grounds. Rather, he believes that the men who fawn over and act abusively toward Holly are abhorrent on aesthetic grounds. For the narrator, this is an easier way to comprehend the world. He can perceive, understand, and change aesthetic parts of the world far more easily than he can wrestle with the morality of others.

“She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy's adolescent voice.”

Holly's singing voice is markedly different from her speaking voice. The difference hints at the dark truths in her past that she keeps hidden from the world. Her speaking voice is the cultivated, curated version of Holly which she projects into society while her singing voice—only used when she is alone—is the honest, pained version of Holly which she wishes to hide from everyone else.

“Is that the end?”

Holly listens to the narrator's story and is perturbed by his inability to end the narrative. Her confusion functions as an ironic comment on her relation to the narrator himself: at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany's, she will disappear and deny him the neat, conventional ending that he craves. There is no end to Holly's life, nor to the way the narrator wishes to write it.

“She isn't a phony because she's a real phony.”

O. J. Berman is one of Holly's best and only friends. He understands her complicated relationship with sincerity. She is a phony, he says, but she is a phony who completely believes in her own phoniness. She is complete sincerity, masquerading as wry irony. In a world which is deeply cynical and self-involved, Holly's sincerity stands out.

“It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't any right to give him one.”

Holly does not want to name her cat because she feels a strong sense of empathy toward the cat's individuality. The narrator also does not have a name, but Holly gives him one anyway. Holly feels a closer bond to the cat than she does to the narrator; she refers to the narrator as Fred because she feels she has the right to name the men in her life. This naming is a system of control that she employs, one which she does not extend to the cat. Holly’s insistence upon the cat’s independence and lack of belonging reflects her own struggles with independence and lack of direction.

“She told Berman, Hitler was right.”

Fascism and contemporary political politics are uninteresting to the characters. They wield such politics as a cudgel with which they can hit one another. Racism, anti-gay bias, and hateful ideologies are irrelevant to the characters who exist in their own social bubble in New York. They are disconnected from the real implications of these abstract concepts, so someone like Mag can insists that "Hitler was right" (40) at a party because she knows that no one will take her seriously. The way in which the characters conceive of these subjects reveals their disconnect from the world and their own petty self-involvement.

“He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out.”

The narrator overhears Holly discussing him with Mag. According to Holly, the narrator is an observer and an outsider who desperately wants to become an insider. She is proved right almost immediately, as the narrator is standing unseen and eavesdropping on her conversation. He is detached and alienated from the rest of the world, though Holly clearly understands him better than he understands himself.

“The next best [ . . . ] is a perfect fool, which Mag was, because then you can dump the lease on them and send them out for the laundry.”

Holly is not a wholly moral person. Occasionally, she allows her vindictive side to slip through the cracks in her conversation. She is happy Mag is moving into her home not because she wants to share the apartment with her friend, but because Mag gives her the opportunity to flee the lease with impunity. Holly is occasionally racist and spiteful, and has an anti-gay bias. In the social circle in which she operates, however, such behavior is not only common but expected.

“"But really, darling, you made such a tragedy out of your childhood I didn't feel I should compete.”

Holly adheres to social rules and conventions when it suits her to do so. When discussing the past with the narrator, for example, she does not want to reveal the traumatic truth about her childhood. She casually dismisses her own experiences by insisting that she does not want to "compete" (48). The remark chides the narrator for being so open while making clear that she has no intention of sharing. This stoicism and emphasis on propriety is rarely seen in Holly's behavior, except when she wants to hide her true self from the world.

“We wore masks all the way home.”

The narrator and Holly steal Halloween masks from a store and wear them home. The masks are a neat visual metaphor for their relationship: Holly is hiding her true self from the narrator and distracting him with vague allusions to criminality. She wears her stolen identity and pretends that doing so is a charming, fun experience. The narrator, seduced by this framing of events, chooses not to investigate further.

“Though it was now nearly March, the enormous Christmas tree turned brown and scentless, its balloons shriveled as an old cow's dugs.”

The Christmas tree in Holly's apartment is a symbol of the way in which she deals with trauma. Like her abusive childhood, she avoids dealing with the issue and allows it to rot and fester until a time when it becomes impossible to ignore. Between the tree and her trauma, Holly is adept at refusing to deal with a problem when it is not convenient to do so.

“That’s how your stories sound. As though you'd written them without knowing the end.”

Holly's critique of the narrator's writing is that he never knows how to end his stories. This critique contains an inherent irony, as the actual novel based on Holly's life—that is to say, Breakfast at Tiffany's—lacks a neat, convenient ending. Holly simply vanishes from the narrator's life and denies him the opportunity to include catharsis or a resolution. He writes her story without knowing the real ending, just as she said he wrote all his other stories.

“Glancing up at her lighted windows, I hoped her friends were there.”

The narrator is a flawed individual. He is prone to bursts of spite, just like many of the other characters. When he meets Doc Golightly, he takes the man back to Holly's apartment while secretly hoping that he will have the opportunity to embarrass Holly in front of her friends. The narrator is willing to use one of the most traumatic and abusive episodes from Holly's past to vindicate his own petty feelings. That he included this in the narrative is honest, revealing that no one in the story—not even the narrator—is without flaws.

“If you let yourself love a wild thing, you'll end up looking at the sky.”

Holly gives advice to Joe, warning him not to let himself "love a wild thing" (65) but her advice is self-serving. She forces herself to believe this as a way to navigate the trauma of her past. After her abusive childhood and her struggles to find love as an adult, she does not believe herself to be worthy of love. She constructs an elaborate explanation about loving a "wild thing" (65) such as herself as a convenient way to explain why she fails, one which does not require her to directly address her own pain.

“I must have no public scandal.”

Jose explicitly states the terms on which he conducts his relationship with Holly. To him, public scandal is the biggest threat to his political ambitions. However, he is aware of Holly's reputation. He continues to be with her in spite of knowing how she is perceived by the world. He is willing to risk public scandal over and over again because he has genuine affection for Holly.

“A person ought to be able to marry men or women.”

In some ways, Holly has a progressive view of the world. These progressive views are often tangentially related to her own personal beliefs, however. She is happy for any person to marry another person, whether they are "men or women" (73), because this is a relationship which operates outside the traditional, conventional social boundaries of love. Holly believes herself to be a transgressive figure in society, so she is able to empathize with other seemingly transgressive ideas, even if she does not fully give herself over to progressive beliefs. She still harbors prejudiced thoughts about gay people, for example, while accepting that their love is as sincere as anyone else's.

“And thank you. For saving my life.”

The narrator thanks Holly for saving his life. His comment has a dark irony to it, as in saving the narrator's life, Holly miscarried her baby. The narrator is unwittingly thanking Holly for prioritizing his life over the life of her unborn child, adding a complicated knot of emotions to an already complicated situation. After learning the truth, the narrator will feel even more obliged to help Holly.

“PLAYGIRL ARRESTED IN NARCOTICS SCANDAL.”

The truth about Holly's involvement in the narcotics scandal is never explicitly stated in the novel. Like so much of Holly's life, she deliberately obfuscated her relationship with Sally Tomato. Ultimately, however, the truth is irrelevant because reality is established by the press. Much like Holly's involvement in sex work, reality is unimportant when the dominant public discourse—set by rumor and gossip—decides the truth. Holly may not be involved in the drug operation but the rumors of her involvement are enough to ruin her reputation regardless.

“My husband and I will positively sue anyone who attempts to connect our names with that ro-ro-ro volting and de-de-de generate girl.”

Rusty and Mag marry to spite Holly and Jose. Once they are married, they complete their spiteful agenda by abandoning Holly in her time of need. Mag threatens to sue anyone who associates her with Holly, disavowing any knowledge of her former friend. The real Mag is revealed when Holly is most desperate.

“Forget me, beautiful child.”

In his letter, Jose cannot help but infantilize Holly. In this respect, their relationship has echoes of Holly's childhood marriage to Doc. Though she sincerely states that she loves both men, Jose and Doc treat Holly like a child. Her inability to resolve this trauma drives her toward familiar, comfortable relationships which are nevertheless infantilizing because this, to Holly, is the only way in which she has experienced something resembling love. Her flawed comprehension of love is built on years of unresolved trauma and abuse.

“Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl's complexion.”

Holly's wry comment about the lighting and her complexion has a deeper symbolism. The "certain shades of limelight" (90) are a metaphor for the attention she is receiving in the public press. The complexion that she is worried about wrecking is, in fact, the carefully constructed identity which she has built for herself. Holly has assembled an identity which allows her to hide her traumatic past and now, due to the attention thrown upon her, she is struggling to maintain this identity.

“We never made each other any promises. We never—”

Holly clings to the idea that she and her cat are disconnected and similar but, just after releasing the cat in Harlem, she realizes the implications of this association. If she deserts the cat at a difficult time, she worries that she herself will be abandoned. She wants to change her life but, by abandoning the cat, she is propagating the same behavior. Holly halts mid-sentence because she realizes the symbolic implications of what she has done and how this might affect her own hopes and ambitions.