Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Romance Novella That Everyone Should Read At Least Once
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a highly celebrated and famous contemporary romance novella by Truman Capote. It inspired a 1961 movie adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn, which was made three years after the book was written and made fourteen million United States dollars of profit. Despite being more than fifty years old, both the novella and the film remain incredibly popular today and have made a substantial impact on literature over the years. But what exactly was it about this succinct story that made it so successful?
As you might imagine, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is not a typical book. It was clearly not created to meet the needs of the readers. There are many books which contain trite ideas and concepts that have been overused throughout the decades up to the point where they are no longer truly entertaining and special in order to do this, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s is not one of these. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Let’s dive into to this charming story to truly discover why it did, and continues to do, so well.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s begins as we meet a narrator, which, in the book, was never given a name. However, in the film adaptation, he is known as Paul Varjak. The narrator is a budding writer who lives in a brownstone apartment building. He witnesses a young girl, Holiday Golightly, who goes by the nickname Holly, move in to the building as well. However, in the initial stages of the book, the narrator had yet to truly meet and speak to Holly, and simply observes her from afar.
Later, a typical and plain night in the narrator’s room turns takes an exciting turn when he sees Holly on the fire escape outside of his window. She knocks on the glass and he lets her come in, allowing the two to be able to interact for the first time. After a brief conversation, Holly, who had needed to rest, hops onto the narrator’s bed. She says that he reminds her of her brother, Fred, which makes her feel comfortable. A little while after, the narrator notices that Holly begins to cry, and before he can figure out why, she rushes back to her apartment.
Over time, the narrator and Holly are able to get to know each other better. The narrator is invited to one of Holly’s parties in which she invites many men to her apartment. He accepts the offer and arrives at the party, where he meets OJ Berman, a man who attempted to help Holly become an actress. He also meets a man named Rusty Trawler, who claims to love Holly, Mag Wildwood, a model that Holly is not particularly fond of, and a Brazilian diplomat that Mag is about to marry.
Holly later informs that narrator that one of the ways she earns money is by visiting a man called Sally Tomato in prison. She gets paid after the visit when she gives ‘weather reports’ to Tomato’s lawyer, O’Shaughnessy. Though these visits may seem to be of little or no consequence for Holly, this changes later on in the story and becomes a pivotal point in the plot.
Later, Holly, Rusty, Mag and the man she is engaged to take a trip to Florida. However, the vacation does not go well, and Mag and Rusty end up in the hospital. A little while after, Holly and the Brazilian diplomat have an affair and Holly ends up being pregnant. The man even asks Holly to marry her and go to Brazil with her, which upsets the narrator who had enjoyed Holly’s company and had grown to be incredibly attached to her. It even becomes clear that he has fallen in love with her.
Despite this, he says that he will go horseback riding with her before her departure from New York a few days later (Holly would like to go to bid farewell to her favorite horse). The ride becomes catastrophic when the narrator’s horse breaks loose and carries him away at an alarming speed. Holly and her horse rush to catch up. Later, when the narrator and Holly are together after the disastrous outing, Holly is arrested by the police who claim that she is involved in a drug scandal with Sally Tomato.
The Brazilian man that Holly was going to marry loves her a lot but cannot be married to her or associated with her after an event like this as it may ruin his career. Before going back to Brazil, he writes Holly a letter. Because Holly can no longer marry him, she decides to leave the country after she is released. However, she is still under investigation so the narrator warns her otherwise, but she doesn’t listen, saying that the Brazilian man had already paid her ticket. The narrator helps her collect her belongings, and though she had been watched by the authorities and was not supposed to leave, she manages to do so anyway and goes to Brazil.
After some time, the narrator gets a postcard from Holly letting him know that she has found a wealthy man and fallen in love with him. She promises to write again once she finds a permanent address, but she doesn’t keep this promise and we discover from the narrator that he hasn’t heard from Holly since. The narrator as well as the reader is left to conjecture over what exactly happened to Holly and whether or not she got a happy ending, but the book ends before we can truly uncover Holly’s ultimate fate.
Though this story had plenty of positive attributes, the best, by far, was Holly Golightly, our narrator’s love interest. Everything about Holly was so incredibly charming, from the way she spoke to her perception of the world. The readers couldn’t help but be just as fascinated by her as the narrator, and we grew to love her within a matter of pages. Holly was a uniquely magical character that was truly special in her own way. We scarcely see such authentic and unfeigned personalities in characters nowadays.
However, Holly was not the only part of the book that captivated us. Another was Truman Capote’s marvelous writing style. These two aspects of the novella truly made it unique and worth the read. Breakfast at Tiffany’s surpassed readers expectations of any book, leaving them stunned, despite the most copies are less than one hundred pages. Only few authors can tell a wonderful story that will win our hearts in such a short amount of time.
Additionally, rather than expressing how the characters felt explicitly, there were plenty of odd little hints given, especially about the narrator’s feelings about Holly over time. Only the most avid readers were able to pick up on these innuendos and realize how the narrator truly felt as time passed. Though it was not hard to notice that the narrator was indeed in love with Holly by the end, it was highly likely that this had happened long before. Another instance of this was with the weather reports that Holly gave every time she visited Sally Tomato, which later became incredibly significant.
Furthermore, all of the peculiar twists that the story took made it so much more special. No one could have predicted that by the end of the book, Holly would have had her child killed on an out of control horse ride, been investigated for taking part in a drug scandal, and would have run all the way to Brazil, never to return. The book was especially clever to have taken so many of these turns in the final few pages of the novella, rather than the beginning and middle which focused mostly on Paul and Holly.
In spite of all of this, there are a few complaints that readers may have had after reading the novella. The first was that more could have been done with Holly and the narrator. It was extremely disappointing to see Holly and the narrator’s romance end without any major results and with the narrator left alone, completely devastated. We would have liked to see their relationship go a tiny bit further in order for us to truly be content. Nevertheless, one of the reasons this did not happen was likely due to the fact that the real ending kept readers thinking more. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was not made for the readers’ needs, but rather was a great story without trying to fit any standards.
Many readers also would have simply liked to see more to the plot. The story was incredibly condensed, and though Capote did a great job with the limited amount of pages he used, it’s highly likely that the book could have gone longer for its readers. The plot could have continued in any other direction; it wasn’t entirely necessary for all of it to have ended there. However, this was one of the reasons it was so wonderful, and after all, it was meant to be a novella.
All in all, Breakfast at Tiffany’s remains an incredibly popular and captivating novel even so many decades after it was first published. It is light and fluffy quick read that will charm you and hold your attention until the very end with characters that will stay with you for your whole life. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is no ordinary book as it will not meet your expectations and standards; rather, it will excel them in ways you never thought possible. Each and every reader should give Breakfast at Tiffany’s at least one chance. From the enchanting humor to the fickle yet highly amusing plot, you are sure to enjoy every minute of it.
