While criticisms on Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) centered around the political/sexual radicalism of its heroine, Holly Golightly, and her pervasiveness, they have long dismissed the novel's unknown narrator as just a neutral observer or Capote's homosexual double. This paper examines how this underestimated narrator functions as a key to the novel's strategic resistance to the repressive normative society of the Cold War era. Heterosexism thinking typical of the Cold War era is revealed in contemporary readers' facile reading of the narrator's sexual passivity toward Holly as a sign of being homosexual, and therefore critics who have often been eager to detect the narrator's closeted homosexuality cannot avoid being blamed for having made the same misrecognition. Rather, the narrator's passivity should be considered as a rejection of compulsory heterosexism and its demanding performance as an "authentic" man. In this respect, as Holly's naming of the unknown narrator after her brother symbolically shows, their friendship is an escape from the reality of the 50s, when maturation and building a "nuclear family" become the social obsession. Through the reading of the narrator's obsessive feeling toward Holly, we can see the Holly-narrator relationship as a surrogate for "mother-child" relationship and the leaving of Holly at the end is, for the narrator, the loss of "mother." The whole impression of the novel, however, is rather gentle and hopeful. To explicate this, we'll trace the narrator's career and development as an author by examining the aesthetic structure of his two short stories and the novel itself, which was written by the matured narrator. In Breakfast at Tiffany's the narrator, as well as Capote himself, managed to sublimate the loss of "mother" and could therefore write a story outside of dominant scheme of Heterosexism ideology and the discourse of the Cold War era.
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