Breakfast Tiffany'Es

Breakfast tiffany’s

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Breakfast at Tiffany's Summary

Breakfast at Tiffany's documents the year-long friendship of a New York writer, whose name is never mentioned, with his neighbor Holly Golightly. The story is presented as the writer's recollections approximately twelve years after the conclusion of the friendship. Reminded of Holly by a visitwith another old friend, Joe Bell, who is in possession of a photograph of an African carving that resembles Holly, the narrator relates that he occupied the same upper East-side brownstone as Holly over ten years ago. Shortly after he moves in, he notices Holly late one summer night when she loses her key and rings another tenant, I.Y. Yunioshi, to let her into the building, causing a commotion. Hedescribes her as just under nineteen years old, thin and chicly dressed with a boyish haircut. When Holly begins ringing the narrator to let her into the building late at night, he is intrigued. He enjoys observing Holly at trendy restaurants and night clubs around town, and often watches her feeding her nameless cat or playing country songs on her guitar from his fire escape window. He eventakes note of her trash, which contains numerous love letters from overseas soldiers.

[pic][pic][pic]In September, Holly visits the narrator's apartment in the middle of the night after one of her lovers turns vicious in bed. The two converse and Holly reveals that she has been paying weekly visits to Sally Tomato, a notorious gangster who is incarcerated in Sing Sing prison. Tomato's lawyer,O'Shaughnessey, pays Holly $100 per visit to convey "the weather report" - encrypted messages - between the two men. The narrator reads Holly one of his short stories, which she finds uninteresting, and the two fall asleep on his bed. She leaves abruptly when he asks her why she is crying in the middle of her sleep.

Despite this hostile exchange, Holly and the narrator reconcile, and she invites himto a party at her apartment. There, the narrator meets O.J. Berman, a Hollywood agent who relates the story of his unsuccessful attempts to make Holly the teenage runaway into Holly the movie starlet. The narrator also meets Rusty Trawler, a millionaire famous for his checkered family past who appears to be conducting an affair with Holly, and Mag Wildwood, an eccentric model who drunkenlyinsults Holly and passes out on the living room floor. Holly is upset with the narrator for not seeing Mag home safely, but he continues to observe Holly from a distance. He takes particular notice when Mag moves into Holly's apartment and often sees the two women leaving the apartment in the evenings accompanied by Rusty Trawler and Jose Yberra-Jaegar, a Brazilian politician to whom Mag is engaged.Holly and the narrator reconcile when he shares with her the exciting news that his first short story has been published. While she feels that he should be more commercially ambitious as a writer, she nevertheless takes him out to celebrate. The two spend a day at Central Park, where they exchange stories about their childhoods, the narrator noticing that Holly's story is a fabrication. They latershoplift Halloween masks from Woolworth's. Shortly thereafter, the narrator spots Holly entering the public library. Following her inside, he observes that she is consulting books about the politics and geography of Brazil. Despite the deceptions and secrets that seem to trouble Holly's relationships with others, the two become close. On Christmas Eve, the narrator and Holly exchange gifts: hepresents her with a St. Christopher's medal from Tiffany's, her favorite New York landmark, and she gives him an antique bird cage she knew he had admired, making him promise that he will never use it to imprison a "living thing."

Holly's inner circle crumbles in February, when Mag suspects Holly of having an affair with Jose on a group trip to the Florida keys. Upon her return, she and the...