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Breakfast at Tiffany's Section 11: Difference between revisions
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==Summary== | ==Summary== | ||
José abandons Holly when her name appears in the paper as a playgirl linked with the drug ring headed by Sally Tomato. The unnamed narrator takes José's letter to Holly, who is in the hospital, having lost her baby in a scuffle with the police.Holly, who seemed child-like when the narrator first gets to the hospital, makes a visible change when she sees the letter. She seems to age and harden. She asks the narrator for her cosmetics, because "A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick." Holly applies lipstick and rouge, eyeliner and eyeshadow. She also puts on pearls, her dark glasses, sprays herself with perfume and lights a cigarette. She is readying her protective coating for what she expects to see in the letter (Garson 84). | José abandons Holly when her name appears in the paper as a playgirl linked with the drug ring headed by Sally Tomato. The unnamed narrator takes José's letter to Holly, who is in the hospital, having lost her baby in a scuffle with the police. Holly, who seemed child-like when the narrator first gets to the hospital, makes a visible change when she sees the letter. She seems to age and harden. She asks the narrator for her cosmetics, because "A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick." Holly applies lipstick and rouge, eyeliner and eyeshadow. She also puts on pearls, her dark glasses, sprays herself with perfume and lights a cigarette. She is readying her protective coating for what she expects to see in the letter (Garson 84). | ||
==Notes== | ==Notes== | ||
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Holly labels José "a rat" like all the others, although she finally agrees bitterly with the narrator that José's reasons for giving her up, his religion and his career, are valid for the type of man he is. Holly then decides to flee the country, using the ticket for Brazil that José had brought her. For a time it seemed that Holly had found her dream, her "place where me and things belong together." Her relationship with José might have been like her vision of Tiffany's, with "quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there" (Garson 84, 85). | Holly labels José "a rat" like all the others, although she finally agrees bitterly with the narrator that José's reasons for giving her up, his religion and his career, are valid for the type of man he is. Holly then decides to flee the country, using the ticket for Brazil that José had brought her. For a time it seemed that Holly had found her dream, her "place where me and things belong together." Her relationship with José might have been like her vision of Tiffany's, with "quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there" (Garson 84, 85). | ||
In his book, ''Truman Capote'', Kenneth Reed states that ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'', shares with most of Capote's other fiction a concern for people who are liberated from the more commonplace moorings of social and cultural life, and who are scarcely concerned with such things as family relationships and middle class notions of respectability.For example, when the narrator warns Holly that if she jumps bail, she will never again be able to come home, it impresses her not at all (Reed 92). | In his book, ''Truman Capote'', Kenneth Reed states that ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'', shares with most of Capote's other fiction a concern for people who are liberated from the more commonplace moorings of social and cultural life, and who are scarcely concerned with such things as family relationships and middle class notions of respectability. For example, when the narrator warns Holly that if she jumps bail, she will never again be able to come home, it impresses her not at all (Reed 92). | ||
''Breakfast at Tiffany's'' is a showcase for Holly Golightly. O.J. Berman introduced her as a "real phony" who honestly "believes all this crap she believes," and the remainder of the story is a gradual exposition of the content of this belief. All her life she has known deprivation and death and fought a desparate battle against fear.It is, finally, the awareness of death that keeps her from feeling at home anywhere and impels her on a constant search for something better (Nance 1). | ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'' is a showcase for Holly Golightly. O.J. Berman introduced her as a "real phony" who honestly "believes all this crap she believes," and the remainder of the story is a gradual exposition of the content of this belief. All her life she has known deprivation and death and fought a desparate battle against fear. It is, finally, the awareness of death that keeps her from feeling at home anywhere and impels her on a constant search for something better (Nance 1). | ||
==Study Questions== | ==Study Questions== | ||