Identity is a central theme in both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Truman Capote’s ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. They both present identity as mutable, a constantly changing veneer that shapes how people are viewed by the characters and reader. The novellas themselves examine how aspects from every area of people’s lives mould their identities and this can be seen from the way they present, to the objects around them and what they can tell us about the characters and their identities.
The identities of the narrators in ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ form how we perceive the identity of the characters. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote both recognise and employ this through their use of unreliable narrators and the lack of distinct identity in their narrators. In ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Nick Carraway acts as an observer, almost seeming as though others don't even recognise his presence. Despite this being his role, Nick often seems unable to gain a clear image of what happens around him. He appears to be stuck between worlds, unable to find or decide on his identity. Nick has a “prominent, well-to-do” family in the Midwest. He comes from ‘old money’ so it is unsurprising that he deems West Egg to be “the less fashionable of the two.” However, he finds himself living in West Egg, attempting to make his own fortune following the American Dream. He doesn’t fit into the world of either ‘new money’ or ‘old money’, instead caught somewhere between the two. He also seems stuck between the worlds of finance and literature; working as a bond salesman, yet narrating from the future as an author. His poetic style of writing directly contradicts his career which relies on practicality and numbers. This implies a difficulty in realising his identity. Nick also seems to be stuck between reality and fantasy, seemingly unable to gain a clear picture of the events happening around him. He states that “everything that happened had a dim, hazy cast over it”, due to his almost always being either half drunk or half asleep and also intensified by the heat of summer. The novel being set in summer gives a dreamlike yet tense feeling, lending a promise of possibility, but also intense disorientation. Daisy says they are all so “hot and confused” and this is reflected in Nick’s inability to discern details about the people and situations around him. In a letter to Fitzgerald, Maxwell Perkins, his editor, states that “Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader's eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim.”(1) Not only is Nick struggling to discover his own identity, but he is failing to recount the identity of those around him to the reader. One characteristic of Nick’s that we are sure of is his bias towards Gatsby. Claire Stocks stated that “Nick wants to portray Gatsby as 'great' and to ignore or edit anything that might undermine that image.”(2) The bias towards Gatsby is inherent even from the title and remains clear until his last words to Gatsby - “They're a rotten crowd [...] You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Nick’s hazy perception affects how we perceive those who are meant to be the focal point of the novel. His failure to observe and his clear bias further undermines Nick’s role as an author and his identity as an observer.
The unnamed narrator in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is similarly lacking in identity and equally unreliable in his descriptions of others. He does not appear stuck between worlds as Nick does; his lack of identity comes from a lack of disclosure rather than indecision. Throughout the course of the novella we learn incredibly little about him, to the point we never even learn his name. The biggest sense of his identity we get is through his interactions with Holly, his fascination with her and his sadness at the thought of losing her. Before he got to know her, the narrator's interest in Holly was clear. He states “Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, [...] I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers.” Through his interest and observation, Holly becomes a point of fixation and bias for the narrator and his identity begins to be shaped by her presence. She names him ‘Fred’ after her brother, imposing an identity upon him, which he grows into and embodies throughout the novella. The narrator states that he “loved her enough to forget [him]self.” The word “forget” implies that he may have had his own identity, however it has become unimportant now his relationship with Holly has overtaken his life. It is impossible to know how much of what we see of his character is his own identity, or the identity of ‘Fred.’ Similarly to Nick, the unnamed narrator is an author. His role is to observe, functioning as a way for us to learn about Holly. Being an author is the only part of his identity that seems to come from before Holly, however, even this side of him is changed and shaped by her as she both stimulates his success through her connections, and becomes the focus of his work, just as Gatsby becomes the subject of Nick’s work. Fitzgerald and Capote exploit our perception of the narrators to shape how we understand the identities of other characters in the novels. Both display clear bias toward the main characters and forget their own identities in order to pursue a connection with them. It is impossible to know how the world works outside their obsession, therefore our perception of other characters is likely skewed by their unreliability.
Identity is also presented as mutable through the exploration of Daisy Buchanan and Holly Golightly’s identities as women. Both characters view and take charge of their femininity in starkly different ways, however, both end up changing their identities in response to the men around them. Daisy’s identity is shaped by what men want her to be, taking on their view of femininity and symbolising the ideal 1920s wife. Fitzgerald sets this up immediately just from her name. The name Daisy references the flower which widely represents innocence and purity due to their being small, white and frail. In fact, in Norse Mythology, the daisy is the sacred flower of Freya, the Goddess of love, beauty and fertility. In the 1920’s, some women became ‘Flappers’ and began to experiment with their sexualities and individualities, however, an ideal woman's role was still to be a wife and mother, and through her name Daisy is given this role. However, her name also illustrates shallowness and the vagueness of her identity. Her maiden name ‘Fay’ derives from the Middle English fae or fairy. Although this could be seen as an indicator of her beauty, it also connotes her lack of substance and flightiness underneath the superficial layer, creating a feeling of transience and vagueness. Daisy’s associations with light, purity and innocence are continued through her almost always being seen “dressed in white” and describing her childhood as her “white girlhood.” However, there is promiscuity and shallowness revealed in her character. Nick notices that “Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean towards her,” which signifies her deliberate harnessing of her own sexuality to appeal to men. Judith Fetterley states that “Daisy viewed from the outside as an object to be possessed is one thing and Daisy confronted as a person is quite another”(3) she argues that inaccessibility increases the romantic potential, and once Gatsby finally has access, she is “inevitably inadequate.” Nick notices that Daisy “tumbled short of [Gatsby’s] dreams” due to the “colossal vitality of his illusion.” This furthers the argument that Daisy’s identity is a facade of ideals while her true nature is unknown and more undesirable than she appears. The erasure of her front is emphasised through the introduction of her daughter. Daisy views her daughter as another possession to show off and her previous associations of motherhood are crushed by her lack of maternal instinct. This is clear through the brevity of the interaction with her daughter and, despite the showering of showy compliments such as “little dream,” the lack of meaningful interaction between mother and daughter. The fact Daisy feels the need to clarify “your mother that loves you” proves that she fails to show this “love” through her actions. Although from the outside Daisy appears to be an ideal wife, her identity is mutable and has been shaped to please the men around her, acting a veneer for her true nature.
Holly Golightly’s identity is also shaped by her experience as a woman. Initially, Holly appears to have complete autonomy regarding her life and identity. She is self-sufficient and in control of her own identity, not acting to adhere to standards of femininity. On her first meeting with the narrator, she climbs through his window and immediately insults his apartment, calling it a “chamber of horrors” and looking at it with “dispraising eyes.” Holly emanates a sense of freedom and impermanence. She is “terrified someone’s gonna stick [her] in a cage” and insists that she and the cat “don't belong to each other.” Capote uses both the cat and the cage as recurring symbols, representing different parts of her identity. The birdcage epitomises her desire for freedom and fear of being held captive. Furthermore, the cat simultaneously represents Holly’s greatest fears and her version of home by her unwillingness to recognise the connection they have. By refusing to give the cat a name, she avoids creating any sense of commitment or obligation to another being due to her view of connection with another as inherently negative, leading to an intense fear of becoming trapped in commitment. Holly fails to recognise that having a connection with another doesn’t have to detract from independence or individual identity and realises too late that she and the cat did have a meaningful relationship, providing each other comfort and companionship without compromising her freedom. Despite this, her fear of losing her freedom and individual identity is not unfounded. Because of her being a woman in the 1940s, a time in which this kind of untethered freedom was rarely available, her identity is constantly undermined, both by other characters and by herself. One example is Holly’s neighbour Madame Sapphia Spanella who frequently threatens to call the police and calls her “morally objectionable” due to her discomfort with the lifestyle that Holly has introduced to the building. She dislikes the fact that Holly’s identity does not align with the 1940’s societal ideal of womanhood. Through her desire for freedom and self-sufficiency, she inadvertently sacrifices her own identity. She creates multiple personas based on the desires of men, becoming a game party girl for soldiers on leave and a stern mistress for Rusty Trawler as “most of his activities were dictated by [Holly] herself.” However, the one for whom she sacrifices her autonomy and freedom the most is also the one that she is most committed to. Upon her engagement to José Ybarra-Jaegar, Holly becomes a housewife with an “un-Holly-like enthusiasm for homemaking” and although it entirely contradicts the identity she had built, she seems genuinely happy in the relationship seeming, “more content, altogether happier”. After the trauma and instability caused her brother Fred's death, her relationship with José brings her stability and comfort, so she completely reinvents herself to please him. Holly creates so many identities to appease men around her that she seems unable to be who she wants. Thomas Fahy states that “Financial security may be an essential ingredient for living an autonomous single life, but it does not seem to help women break free from the ideology of domesticity in America.”(4) This is proven by the fact that none of the wealthy characters seem to achieve personal fulfilment, undermining Holly’s view of Tiffany’s as a place of comfort. He says that women “still seek meaning in men and marriage. When Holly fails to do both, she must flee the country, and Capote uses this moment to suggest that America denies a lasting place for people who reject or resist this ideology.” This undermines the notion of the American Dream which states that anyone can build themselves up to wealth from nothing, and provides a reason for Holly’s attaching herself to Jose despite her refusal to acknowledge the connection between herself and the cat. Even the self-sufficient, independent persona she portrays is a front that can’t make her truly happy or let her recognise the importance of connection.
The lives of Holly and Gatsby mirror each other closely, as do their approaches to their own identities, both trying to harness the mutability of identity in an attempt to reinvent themselves. They are both spurred to do this because of the past, however while Holly is trying to escape the past, Gatsby is trying to relive it. He turns himself from poor soldier James Gatz to extravagant new money Jay Gatsby in a desperate attempt to rekindle a lost love with Daisy Buchannan. The structure of the novella indicates Gatsby’s desperation to return to the past due to the disrupted chronology of the narrative. The whole story is told using a framing narrative as Nick recounts his memories of the summer. Furthermore, as Nick learns about Gatsby, the reader moves backward and forward through his past with the first reference to his childhood appearing in the last chapter after he is already dead. The returns to the past allow fragments to form into a full picture of the summer in 1922. This is reflected by the idea expressed in the final line of the novel, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” in which the verb ‘beat’ is in both the past and present tense, just as Gatsby is desperate to believe that the past and present are interchangeable. Gatsby’s mansion itself mirrors his identity, symbolising the grandness and emptiness that is rampant both in society after the 1920’s boom, and in Gatsby after his attempt to reinvent himself. He keeps it “always full of interesting people, night and day” in an attempt to combat loneliness as the mansion, like Gatsby’s new identity, is a decorative mask behind which he has fallen into an inevitable seclusion due to his identity being insincere, moulded in his desperate attempt to relive the past. Andrew Green states that Gatsby “is a composite of fragments'' and “The nature of his personality is reflected in Nick’s description of his library – an elegant façade, full of books with uncut pages – a place which ‘if one brick was removed […] was liable to collapse.’”(5) The connection here is interesting, suggesting that he wants people to believe that he is cultured and sophisticated and he cultivates his image accordingly, an unconvincing front in the desperate hope of reliving the past. This desire has become Gatsby's ultimate motivation in life and he refuses to give up hope despite Daisy’s marriage to Tom. The symbol of the green light is present from the very beginning of the book, before Nick even meets Gatsby and represents his hope that this new identity can win Daisy back. The main reason Gatsby chose this particular house was the ability to see it and knowing it was Daisy’s, and he uses the house to host massive parties in the hope that she will attend one of them. She has come to influence every choice he makes. Green, being the colour of American banknotes, could represent the wealth he believes will allow him to buy Daisy back. Interestingly, Daisy herself, being richer and from old money is surrounded by connotations of gold and silver. It seems as if Gatsby’s riches are counterfeit or worthless and therefore so is his hope. It describes the illusion of the American Dream. The sentiment of the American Dream has been present since as early as the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and has become an integral notion to the philosophy of the USA. It states that America offers a chance for anyone to build themselves up from nothing to the top of society. The undercutting of an ideology so integral to the philosophy of America suggests that America itself could be considered a fraud. However, the contrast between the green of Gatsby and the silver and gold of the Buchannans proves that even if you have wealth, it is meaningless if you aren’t born into it and can even lead to downfall due to, in most cases, the immoral means of earning it. This highlights the illusion of Gatsby’s hope for his future with Daisy and therefore his rebuilt identity is meaningless as he will never be able to become a person Daisy would marry.
In contrast to Gatsby’s need to relive the past, Holly’s desperation to reinvent her identity is due to her need to escape the past. Before she became Holly Golightly, she was Lulamae. When she was 14, she was married to Doc Golightly which stripped her of her freedom and childhood. Although Doc claims she was an “exceptional woman” who “knew good-and-well what she was doing,” Lulamae’s response to his proposal of “Course we’ll be married. I've never been married before” instantly disproves this. She seems not to understand the permanence of marriage and what it could mean for her and her freedom. Her response is still that of a child. Critics agree that Holly seems to still behave and view the world as a child, with Nona Balakian stating that “[Capote’s] leading ladies are virtually children” and Holly is “so injured in the ways of the world that freedom consists in departing from them.”(6) Nona agrees that her obsession with freedom later on in life stems from being trapped in an unhappy marriage from an early age. Since Lulamae seems not to have been able to fully develop an identity as a child, the identity she tries to create as Holly is incomplete and echoes the child that still lives inside her. Ihab Hassan states that “her existence is thoroughly improvised,”(7) which is illustrated by the air of impermanence and disregard for consequences that surrounds her. The nameless cat, the name plate of “Holly Golightly, travelling” and her apartment in which “Suitcases and unpacked crates were the only furniture” create a semantic field of impermanence and fleetingness about Holly. Hassan also states that Holly’s “loyalty to others … is a loyalty to her own feelings” which displays a lack of emotional maturity. She seems unable to address her own emotions in a way that doesn’t rely on others and her statement of “I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart” emphasises her disregard of consequences and proves her tendency toward childlike hyperbole. Neither Holly nor Gatsby have taken the time to address the past and their reasons for creating this new identity. Gatsby refuses to acknowledge the passage of time as illustrated by his outburst of “’Can't repeat the past?’ [Gatsby] cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” when Nick attempts to confront him and Holly refuses to acknowledge that connection and entrapment are not the same. They are able to create an image of an identity, but due to their inability to confront and come to terms with the past and themselves they are unable to rebuild themselves entirely.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote both present identity as mutable and explore how identity can affect people’s views, lives and surroundings. They use the identity of their narrators to shape the reader's perception of characters and events, discuss how being a woman can affect identity, and explore the idea of reinvention of identity. Ultimately, they present identity as mutable, an inconstant and changeable veneer that shapes how people are viewed by the characters and reader and are often products of their times and lives.
[This is an A level essay and therefore not properly referenced]
Footnotes
(1) E. Perkins, Maxwell. A Letter on The Great Gatsby (1924) Accessed 7 Oct. 2020.
(2) Stocks, Claire. "'All men are [not] created equal': F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: Claire Stocks illustrates how the narrator's bias towards this novel's hero is central to the critique of belief in the 'American Dream'." The English Review, vol. 17, no. 3, 2007, p. 9+. Accessed 7 Oct. 2020.
(3) Fetterley, Judith. “Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction” Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press (1978)
(4) Fahy, Thomas. “Understanding Truman Capote” University of South Carolina Press (2014)
(5) Green, Andrew. “Fragmentation in The Great Gatsby”, emagazine (2018) https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/articles/28531 Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.
(6) Balakian, Nona. “The Prophetic Vogue of the Anti-Heroine.” Southwest Review, vol. 47, no. 2, 1962, pp. 134–141. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43467384 Accessed 1 Nov. 2020
(7) Hassan, Ihab H. “Birth of a Heroine.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 34, no. 1, 1960, pp. 78–83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40625613 Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.
Bibliography
Balakian, Nona. “The Prophetic Vogue of the Anti-Heroine.” Southwest Review, vol. 47, no. 2, 1962, pp. 134–141. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43467384 Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.
Fahy, Thomas. “Understanding Truman Capote” University of South Carolina Press (2014)
Fetterley, Judith. “Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction” Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press (1978)
Green, Andrew. “Fragmentation in The Great Gatsby”, emagazine (2018) https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/articles/28531 Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.
Hassan, Ihab H. “Birth of a Heroine.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 34, no. 1, 1960, pp. 78–83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40625613 Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.
E. Perkins, Maxwell. A Letter on The Great Gatsby (1924) Accessed 7 Oct. 2020.
Stocks, Claire. "'All men are [not] created equal': F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: Claire Stocks illustrates how the narrator's bias towards this novel's hero is central to the critique of belief in the 'American Dream'." The English Review, vol. 17, no. 3, 2007, p. 9+. Accessed 7 Oct. 2020.
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