Breakfast at Tiffany's Section 11: Difference between revisions

While she is recovering in the hospital, the narrator goes to Holly's apartment and discovers Josés cousin packing his things. The man leaves with Josés possessions giving the narrator only a letter, from Jose to Holly. Holly is displayed on the front page of every newspaper. "PLAYGIRL ARRESTED IN NARCOTICS SCANDAL" was just one of the headlines. This was too much for Jose, whose entire life was more dedicated to his public career than to having a wife and family. He fled for Brazil saying in his letter to Holly, "But conceive of my despair upon discovering in such a brutal and public style how very different you are from the manner of woman a man of my faith and career could hope to make his wife.  Verily I grief for the disgrace of your present circumstance, and do not find it in my heart to add condemn to the condemn that surrounds you" (Cash 1) .

Second, when Holly tells the narrator that she will not testify against Sally Tomato, she calls the narrator a name laden with queer meaning:" Well, I may be rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not." In homosexual slang, "maude signifies a male prostitute or a male homosexual.The narrator himself makes a veiled reference to his homosexuality when he compares his rain-soaked trip from Holly's apartment to Joe Bell's bar to another difficult journey he had made years ago: "Never mind why, but once I walked from New Orleans to Nancy's Landing, Mississippi, just under five hundred miles. Nancy's Landing is Capote's creation; it does not exist geographically. According to A Dictionary of the Underworld, "Nancy" refers either to the posterior or to "an effeminate man, especially a passive homosexual." "Nancy's Landing," then serves as Capote's code phrase for a homosexual. Thus, the narrator's coy rejoinder that the reader should "never mind why" he made the trip appears as a subtle move to direct attention away from his self-confession (Pugh 1).