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.
Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
The narrator leaves Holly's apartment, collects the birdcage from his rooms, and then places it outside her apartment. The next day, the birdcage is sat beside the road, "waiting for the garbage collector" (56). The narrator collects the birdcage as he cannot bear to see it thrown away.
A considerable amount of time passes before the narrator talks to Holly again. Despite their falling out, he refuses to sign his name to a petition calling for Holly to be evicted from the apartment building. A neighbor has declared that Holly is "morally objectionable" (56) and that her parties are disruptive. The narrator ignores these claims.
In spring, he begins to see a "very provocative man" (57) lurking in and around the building. The narrator wonders whether the man is a police officer or associated with Sally Tomato. One evening, the man follows the narrator to a diner. While walking, the man whistles one of the tunes that Holly plays on her guitar. The narrator confronts the man, who asks the narrator for "a friend" (58). He introduces himself as Doc Golightly and shows the narrator pictures of Holly as a child, as well as Holly's brother, Fred. The narrator assumes that Doc is Holly's father. He is, in fact, "her husband" (59). Doc Golightly is a Texan veterinarian who has been searching for his wife Holly for five years. His latest lead is a letter from Fred which mentioned that Holly is in New York. He wants to take her back to Texas to be with her husband and children, by which he means her stepchildren.
Doc Golightly was married to his children’s mother who died two years before he married Holly. At the time Doc married Holly, she was 14 but he insists that she was mature enough to become "a child-wife from Tulip, Texas" (60). She ran away after several years of happy marriage, he claims. Doc explains that he adopted Holly and her brother Fred when he caught them stealing from his farm. They were running away from their abusive foster parents after their real parents and their siblings died. Doc believes that Holly filled her head with ideas about New York by "reading dreams" (61) in fashion magazines and that this is why she ran away from him.
The narrator returns to his apartment building with Doc Golightly, who has asked the narrator to approach Holly on his behalf. On the way to the apartment building, they discuss Fred. Doc claims that Fred joined the Army and it is through Fred that Doc was able to track Holly down. He is confident that Holly will want to "go home" (62) with him. The narrator goes to Holly's apartment and finds her just about to leave. She teases him at first and, realizing that her husband is downstairs, seems upset that he is not Fred. Nevertheless, she welcomes Doc "happily" (63) and returns with him to her apartment, where the narrator leaves them alone together.
Chapter 10 Summary
The next day, the narrator and Holly share a drink at Joe Bell's bar. Holly claims that her marriage to Doc "couldn't have been legal" (64) because she was so young, meaning that she did not need to file for divorce. Explaining the previous night, she says she stayed up with Doc and, because he loves her so much, she felt obliged to have sex with him. Now, however, he has left her and gone home. She had to continually remind him that she was not a 14-year-old anymore and he seemed shocked that she would not return to Texas with him. Despite her claims of maturity, she confesses that she feels young and naïve. The “mean reds” have returned, making her feel lost and alone. She does not blame Doc for loving her, as he had the misfortune to fall in love with a "wild thing" (65) like her young self. She toasts her drink to Doc and his kindness.
Chapter 11 Summary
A few days later, the narrator is riding on the subway. He spots a newspaper headline which claims that Rusty Trawler has married for the fourth time. Assuming that Rusty has "eloped to Greenwich" (66) with Holly, the narrator is overcome by a sudden surge of anger and jealousy. He reflects on this for a moment and then realizes that his love for Holly is purely platonic, though he still feels a little jealous. Reading the entire story, however, the narrator discovers that he was wrong—Rusty is actually married to Mag. The narrator returns home where a neighbor tells him to "bring the police" (67) because Holly is being attacked. The narrator rushes to Holly's apartment. He tries to get in but fails. Jose arrives and lets them both in, using his own key. Jose has brought a doctor with him. Inside, the apartment has been "tremendously wrecked" (68). The doctor steps across the broken glass to the bed, where Holly has collapsed. The doctor administers a sedative. Jose is worried that Holly's outburst may cause a "public scandal" (69). Holly is not upset by the news about Rusty, Jose explains. Rather, she received a telegram from Doc which told her that Fred was "killed in action" (70).
From this point on, Holly never refers to the narrator as Fred. She limits her social appearances and spends more time in her apartment. Jose moves in with Holly, who only seems to leave the building for her weekly trip to Sing Sing to see Sally Tomato. During this time, she attempts to "master Portuguese" (71) and finally adds furniture to her sparse apartment. She confesses to the narrator that she is considering marrying Jose and moving to Brazil with him. During one of their conversations, she mentions to him that she is pregnant. She talks about sex with the narrator and says that she has slept with 11 men because she "doesn't count" (72) any sexual partners from before she was 13 years old. The narrator and Holly spend time together though they hardly talk.
Chapter 12 Summary
One day in the fall, the narrator waits for the mailman. Holly passes by and, on a whim, suggests that they go horseback riding in Central Park. She mentions that doing so is part of her "goodbye" (75) to the city as she will soon move to Brazil with Jose. The narrator is shocked when Holly insists that she has no real friends in New York.
As he grows frustrated, the narrator asks Holly whether she has mentioned that she is "married already" (76). Holly tells him to keep her marriage to Doc Golightly a secret. They ride horses through the park but teenagers spook the narrator's horse. The horse charges away through the park and the narrator can only cling onto the reins, "scarcely attached" (77). Holly and a mounted police officer chase down the narrator and bring the horse to a stop. As the police officer leads the spooked horses back to their stable, Holly and the narrator take a taxi home. He credits her with saving his life and tells her that he loves her. She kisses him on the cheek and calls him a "damn fool" (78). However, the narrator's vision becomes blurred and he passes out.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
The relationship between the narrator and Holly goes through its most difficult moment in the aftermath of Christmas. They argue and, for some time, the narrator refuses to talk to Holly. This period of time emphasizes the importance of Holly to the narrator and the unilateral nature of this relationship. During this period, nothing interesting happens in the narrator's life. He has nothing to contribute to the narrative until Holly's husband Doc speaks to him. Even though the narrator provides the primary perspective in the story, Holly's absence from his life leaves him with nothing to say.
During this time, Holly continues to live as she did before. The narrator overhears her parties and notes the guests who visit her. He is reduced even more explicitly to the role of an outside voyeur, someone who is pushed to the fringes in the more interesting lives of others. Without Holly in his life, the narrator is forced to confront the blunt reality that he has very little to write about or anything worth telling. Even in his own story, he is one of the least interesting characters. This realization fills the narrator with bitterness. When he does speak to Doc, he imagines being able to accompany Doc to Holly's apartment. He hopes that Rusty, Mag, and the others are present so that he, the narrator, can deliberately embarrass Holly in front of her friends. He wants to use her traumatic past as a way to gain revenge for the way in which Holly's absence reveals the emptiness of his own life. Though Holly is alone when they return to the apartment, the fact that the narrator includes this detail suggests that he is unaware of his own spiteful attitudes.
The narrator's spiteful behavior is forgotten in the turmoil of the return of Holly's husband. Doc Golightly was a father figure to Holly and her brother Fred. He took the two youngsters into his home when they ran away from their abusive foster parents. Doc claims that he loves Holly very much. When she turned 14, he married her. By Holly's own admission, she was too young and too immature to consent to a marriage to an adult man, much less one who she was forced to rely on for shelter and care. Doc abused his position as Holly's makeshift guardian and took advantage of a young girl. The narrator's reaction to this description of child abuse is bemusement. Given his prickly relationship with Holly at the time he meets Doc, the narrator is willing to use this traumatic event in Holly's past as a way to resolve the argument with her. The manner in which the narrator uses Doc's return to further his own goals suggests that—at this stage of the story—he is more interested in his own well-being than that of Holly.
In contrast to the narrator's expectations, Holly welcomes Doc into her home and then gently sends him back to Texas. She wanted to leave Doc and she considers what he did to her to be a crime but her feelings toward him are complicated by the sincere affection he has shown her. Holly's trauma is made apparent in her interactions with Doc; she cannot untangle the complicated intersection between love and abuse in her traumatized mind. The result is that her pursuit of love as an adult is colored and directed by her childhood abuse.
Holly shows that she understands her relationship with the narrator better than he does. From the outset, she seems clearly uninterested in the narrator as a potential romantic partner. As if to outline the platonic parameters of their friendship, she decides to give him an identity. She calls him Fred, choosing her own brother's name for the narrator as a foundational part of their relationship. While the narrator is unclear about his feelings toward Holly, she clearly perceives him in a fraternal light.
When the narrator learns about Rusty's marriage, he initially believes that Holly is Rusty's new wife. He feels jealously and only realizes after some reflection that he is not romantically in love with Holly. The narrator needs months to come to the same conclusion that Holly made during their first real meeting. Though the narrator perceives Holly as naïve, she possesses an intuition greater than the narrator realizes.
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By Truman Capote
