Internal Monologue

A resistant reading is a reading within a text which moves beyond the dominant cultural beliefs to challenge prevailing views. The conversation between Mag and Holly is just that. It's forward, witty, over the top, and filled with innuendo ......... sometimes it just slaps you in the face!

"The fourth section of Breakfast at Tiffany's is short, consisting mainly of the narrator's observations of Holly and Mag Wildwood conversing on the fire escape. It establishes the fickle relationship between the two women, who had fought bitterly only a few days earlier. Through the dialogue between Holly and Mag, a "very conventional person", the reader's sense of Holly's unorthodox nature is heightened. Mag's embarrassment at discussing sex, her confessed sexual passivity (she prefers to leave the lights off during sex), and blind patriotism stand in sharp contrast to Holly's candor, sexual assertiveness (she states boldly that "men are beautiful"), and indifference toward her home country, a dangerous sentiment during the heightened patriotism of war time America. Holly's statement that she would "rather be natural" than normal indicates another recurring concern of the novel: that definitions of what is "normal" are arbitrary, and serve to control and restrain the natural freedom of the human spirit. Moreover, Holly's interest in Jose's sexual habits, as well as her statement that she would be better off in Brazil than Mag, indicate Holly's preoccupation with Jose and foreshadow the affair that occupies the novella's later sections.

Holly and Mag's brief discussion of the narrator, whom Mag confuses with Holly's brother Fred, confirms the novella's earlier characterization of the narrator as a outsider who observes, rather than participates in, his own life. Holly's claims that he "wants awfully to be on the inside staring out" suggests that she believes that the narrator's sense of exclusion is not his own choice and is, in fact, a source of despair for him. The narrator's position as unseen voyeur of Holly and Mag's conversation, literally "pressed up against the glass" of his fire escape window, ironically confirms Holly's statement."