A Brief Consideration of Truman Capotes Breakfast at Tiffanys
This 9-page undergraduate essay considers Truman Capotes novel, Breakfast at Tiffanys. Using the book as the only source, this essay answers three questions about the text: Analyze the narrator Fred and explain now his response to Holly influences your impression of her, What would a feminist think of Holly Golightly? and Breakfast at Tiffanys is a very New York story and probably could successfully take place only in that city. Describe the setting and the atmosphere it evokes, and explain its importance to the narrator and to Holly. This essay finds that Fred is ultimately an unreliable narrator who uses Holly as a muse and shapes our perceptions of Holly by diminishing her radical and untraditional qualities. This paper also finds that feminists may see Holly as either problematic or feminist, depending on their reading of the text. Holly is both a traditional and naive woman who uses her appearance and bourgeois pretensions and yet a calculating woman who refuses to allow others to mold her identity. Finally, this paper finds that New York is depicted as both a place of possibility and as a temporary and unsafe place. Holly and Fred have very different experiences of the urban center because of their gender roles and their expectations of the city.
