In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote explores the boundaries between public and private life. As a fashionable and popular young woman who attracts both positive and negative attention in New York City’s “café society,” Holly Golightly has a hard time maintaining any sense of privacy. This is mostly because the people who are drawn to her—and, indeed, there are many—tend to become rather obsessed with her. In fact, even the unnamed narrator becomes fixated on Holly, secretly keeping track of her everyday life before they become friends. Once they grow close, he maintains this close level of attention, constantly hoping to learn more about her life. It is perhaps because Holly is so used to this kind of nosy fascination that she both flaunts and hides details about her life. On the one hand, she freely volunteers information about herself on a regular basis. On the other hand, though, she only does this when it suits her, and is actually quite secretive about other aspects of her life. In this way, Holly pretends that her life is an open book so she can maintain a shred of privacy, throwing people off by making them think she’s told them everything there is to know about herself. By scrutinizing this tactic, then, Capote suggests that even people who are seemingly quite forthcoming are actually capable of leading very private, guarded lives.
The narrator’s interest in Holly’s life comes to the forefront of the novella early on, when he acknowledges his fascination in her daily patterns. He notes that Holly is on the whole unaware of him as a person, but this doesn’t stop him from becoming an “authority” on her life by keeping tabs on her comings and goings. To do this, the narrator reads portions of Holly’s letters, which she rips up and leaves in the hall. He also listens to her when she sits on her fire escape and plays the guitar, and he notes when she comes home late or has loud parties downstairs. Even after they become friends, the narrator’s desire to know more about Holly continues. This is made evident by the fact that the narrator identifies a tick she has of rubbing her nose when she’s been asked a question she doesn’t want to answer. That the narrator is capable of recognizing this is proof in and of itself that he makes a point of trying time and again to gain a certain amount of access into Holly’s life that she’s unwilling to grant him. After hearing Holly crying in her sleep and talking about her brother, Fred, for example, the narrator asks her what was wrong. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Holly says, “I hate snoops.” By saying this, she characterizes herself as a fairly private person, showing the narrator—and, in turn, readers—that she wants to keep certain things to herself.
However, Holly also volunteers quite a bit of information about herself. For instance, when she first introduces herself to the narrator by climbing through his window one night, she goes on at length about her love life, her incriminating association with an imprisoned mobster, and her brother Fred’s personality. As she allows the narrator these insights into her life, he recognizes that these dizzying details help her keep people from asking about things she doesn’t want to tell them. “Like many people with a bold fondness for volunteering intimate information,” he notes, “anything that suggested a direct question, a pinning-down, put her on guard.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the tension between Holly’s forthcoming nature and her private, secretive side. Her openness is actually a defense mechanism, a bait-and-switch tactic that she uses to keep people from learning too much about her personal life and, more specifically, her past.
Holly has good reason to keep people from learning too much about her. For one thing, she exists in a social world in which a person’s reputation is extremely important. After all, her public image is what determines if she’ll be able to financially support herself, since her income is based solely on whether or not wealthy men want to pay her to go out with them. In this sense, Holly benefits from the fact that the people in her social circles are obsessed with her, since this ensures that she’ll remain coveted and highly sought-after. But her secrecy isn’t simply an attempt to make herself look mysterious. Rather, she tries to maintain her privacy because she doesn’t want people to know that she ran away from Doc Golightly, who married her when she was only 14. Of course, it’s not that she’s ashamed of this fact, but that people might judge her for living the life of a single woman when she’s technically married (though this would be highly unfair, considering that Doc Golightly obviously transgressed by marrying her when she was so young). Regardless, though, Holly knows that her ability to lead the life she wants rests upon whether or not people know about her past. Accordingly, she keeps such details hidden by making up for her secrecy with lesser confessions, posing as an exceedingly public person when, in reality, she is quite private. She is, therefore, an example of somebody who embraces public life in order to preserve her own privacy, manipulating other people’s obsession with her so that she doesn’t have to divulge information she’d rather keep secret. And in doing so, Holly demonstrates that even the most ostensibly extroverted people are actually capable of great interiority and guardedness.
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Privacy and Obsession Quotes in Breakfast at Tiffany’s
“And I swear, it never crossed my mind about Holly. You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”
Two men came into the bar, and it seemed the moment to leave. Joe Bell followed me to the door. He caught my wrist again. “Do you believe it?”
“That you didn’t want to touch her? ”
“I mean about Africa.”
At that moment I couldn’t seem to remember the story, only the image of her riding away on a horse. “Anyway, she’s gone.”
But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and melba toast; that her varicolored hair was somewhat self-induced.
But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of piney woods or prairie. One went: Don’t wanna sleep, Don’t wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.
I […] asked her how and why she’d left home so young. She looked at me blankly, and rubbed her nose, as though it tickled: a gesture, seeing often repeated, I came to recognize as a signal that one was trespassing. Like many people with a bold fondness for volunteering intimate information, anything that suggested a direct question, a pinning-down, put her on guard. She took a bite of apple, and said: “Tell me some thing you’ve written. The story part.”
“Fred’s that boy upstairs? I didn’t realize he was a soldier. But he does look stupid.”
“Yearning. Not stupid. He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid. Anyhow, he’s a different Fred. Fred’s my brother.”
[…] Holly wanted to know about my childhood. She talked of her own, too; but it was elusive, nameless, placeless, an impressionistic recital, though the impression received was contrary to what one expected, for she gave an almost voluptuous account of swimming and summer, Christmas trees, pretty cousins and parties: in short, happy in a way that she was not, and never, certainly, the background of a child who had run away.
Or, and the question is apparent, was my outrage a little the result of being in love with Holly myself? A little. For I was in love with her. Just as I’d once been in love with my mother’s elderly colored cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too.
“Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion. Even if a jury gave me the Purple Heart, this neighborhood holds no future: they’d still have up every rope from LaRue to Perona’s Bar and Grill— take my word […]. And if you lived off my particular talents. Cookie, you’d understand the kind of bankruptcy I’m describing.”
