47 pages • 1 hour read
Truman CapoteBreakfast at Tiffany's
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Cat
The nameless cat is one of the most important symbols in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. While Holly Golightly lives in a relatively sparse apartment, one of the few distinguishing features of her home is that she shares it with a cat. She claims to have found the cat when it was wandering the streets and, though she took the cat home, she insists that she is not the cat's owner. To that end, she refuses to even name the cat—the cat, in Holly's opinion, is an individual on its own terms and she has no right to impose something as identifying as a name on the cat. Holly’s refusal to name the cat symbolizes Holly's own reluctance to forge formal ties with anyone or anything. While she claims to sympathize with the cat’s directionless life, many of these sentiments are projected onto the cat by Holly: she wants to be independent, so she creates the symbolic meaning of the cat as an expression of her desire for independence. In this sense, the cat is a symbol of Holly's self-identity.
However, the independence Holly believes the cat possesses is an illusion, as the cat has a limited capacity to survive in her apartment without help from others. On some level, Holly herself recognizes this: When Holly goes away, her first concern is to ask the narrator to feed the cat. When she turns the cat loose on the way to the airport, she immediately regrets her decision and asks the narrator to retrieve the cat, thereby acknowledging that the cat does, after all, need somebody. However, the symbolic idea of the cat's independence remains important to the novel as a whole because it reveals Holly’s own struggles to negotiate the tensions between independence and the need for belonging.
The narrator comes to understand the symbolism between Holly and the cat, drawing upon it at the novel’s end. When Holly leaves, she removes the narrator's ability to end the story. There is no catharsis or resolution to Holly's disappearance. By finding the cat comfortably situated in his new home, however, the narrator is able to provide a hint of what might have happened to Holly: By symbolic extension, he hopes that the cat’s happy new life means that Holly will also one day find a place she belongs.
The Birdcage
The birdcage is another important symbol in the novella. After moving to New York City, the narrator is walking past a store when he sees an ornate birdcage for sale. The birdcage is very expensive, very lavish, and he immediately falls in love with it. His immediate connection to the birdcage is a subtle hint at his motivations for pursuing writing as a career. He is a detached, passive figure who stands on the fringes of a group, always more concerned with documenting and analyzing than contributing in a forthright manner. This personality trait is evidenced by his desire to own the birdcage: The cage is a symbol of the ability to capture and contain beautiful things for his own amusement. His idea of placing parrots or songbirds in the cage is akin to his desire to place amusing characters in his work. By coveting the cage, he is showing his desire to control the people in his life by placing them in his writing.
The birdcage as a symbol can be expanded to more than just the narrator. Many of the male figures in the book have the same desire for control and ownership, though they do not necessarily express this in literary terms. In the patriarchal society of 1940s New York, men view their relationship to women in the context of ownership. Several of the men who go to dinner with Holly talk about what they are owed, treating her as something that can be owned or controlled. These men can spend lavish amounts of money on women but, in doing so, they are placing these women in an ornate cage of their patriarchal expectations. The birdcage is therefore an elaborate symbol for the patriarchal relationship between wealth and sexist expectations.
Holly defies the narrator's ambitions, as well as society's expectations of the role of women. She buys the cage for the narrator herself, but makes him promise that he will never use it to cage a bird. As such, the birdcage is functionally useless. Once it is presented as a gift to the narrator, the birdcage becomes a symbol of Holly’s control over the writer and her own independence. She refuses to be constrained by his expectations, like a bird who refuses to be trapped inside an ornate cage. The narrator can have everything he wants, from the birdcage to a writing career, but she will be the conduit through which these dreams are realized. In an ironic twist of the symbolism, Holly uses a representation of patriarchal society to exert her agency over a man and ensure that she is not confined to play a certain role in his story.
Tiffany's
As the novella’s title, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, immediately suggests, Tiffany's jewelry store is mentioned frequently throughout the story, becoming both a symbol and a motif. The store is imbued with symbolism by Holly, who tells the narrator how she visits the jewelry store whenever she is feeling a particular bout of angst. To Holly, Tiffany's is a symbol of security and belonging. The beautiful, expensive jewelry has a calming effect on the girl who grew up in several abusive households and who is now struggling to make a life for herself in New York City. Part of the reason why Holly finds this symbolic store to be so comforting is that it reduces the transactional nature of society to its rawest form. The store has beautiful, rare items for sale and the only way to do anything other than look at these items is to pay their high price. Holly understands this arrangement, as so many men value her only for her beauty and want to own her without agreeing to her terms. The store has the power and the reputation that Holly covets: She wants to set the terms of her relationship with the transactional, commodified world, just as Tiffany's does with its clientele.
The prospect of owning the jewelry on offer at Tiffany's also represents a financial independence that Holly covets. If she were able to afford the jewelry, she would be rich enough to live on her own terms. At the moment the story takes place, however, Holly is not able to exert such financial independence. The jewelry itself is aspirational, not just in terms of being able to own an expensive item but in terms of having the opportunity to spend money on something that is not rent, food, or the basics necessary for survival. Financial independence is the forerunner to real independence for Holly, so she dreams of being the kind of person who can afford to spend money on unnecessary but validating items.
One of the most potent symbols in the book is therefore a symbol of Holly's own deliberate creation. She brings this symbol to the narrator fully formed, lecturing him on the importance of Tiffany's in her life. In this sense, Holly is the author of her own story and the narrator is simply a stenographer. He writes down the things she tells him to write down, to the point where she is drafting the literary devices in a story of his creation. The narrator may be the aspiring writer, but Holly's comments about Tiffany's represent an innate understanding of storytelling that the narrator does not acknowledge. Like the gift of the birdcage, the gift of the symbol of Tiffany's is given by Holly to the narrator. As such, Tiffany's represents the extent to which the story very much belongs to Holly.
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By Truman Capote
