Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
By Truman Capote

Novel to film adaptations can be found to be in true form of one another, or not at all. The film adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s has so little fidelity to the novel that it completely changes the genre of the story. This change of genre mostly comes from the dramatic changes to the end of the movie. The novel its self can be classified as a drama while the film comes off as a romantic comedy. This overall romantic feeling stems from three major changes within the ending; dialogue, interactions with characters, and the setting. Each of these important literary tools define Truman Capote’s dramatic novella in less than four pages. The same tools define the same story as a romantic comedy genre film in less than a single scene. The ending being compared between the two begins with the limo ride in the book on page 107, and the taxi scene in the movie. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as a novella versus a film, uses literary tools to manipulate the endings and thus change genres.
The dialogue of any literary work greatly impacts how the piece is viewed as a whole, whether it is a film or a novella. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote’s most famous novella, uses dialogue to move the action and convey certain views and feelings of its main characters. Specifically, the dialogue in the ending is most important in staying true to the novella’s dramatic theme. The main character, Holly Golightly, is a dialogue rich character, something that can be found in both novella and movie versions. In the movie, she states; “What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of place for a tough guy like you” speaking to her cat that she is about to let go, both of which occurs in the novella (Aellea). The differences come from this point on as far as Holly’s dialogue as well as the dialogue of her male companion who is unnamed in the novella but is referred to as Paul Varjak in the movie. One of the main differences in...