Who is Holly Golightly? Socialite? Opportunist? A Lost Soul?-a "free bird" not to be caged?....no, she is an existential rogue. Truman Capote carefully handled the creation of this character and through her was able to elaborate on major existential themes. She is clearly one of Capote's most intricate characters and possibly, the greatest existential icon in both American literature and classical, American cinema . With this analysis, Holly Golightly must be broken down to obtain a further glance into the numerous existential elements she inhibits.

"It may be normal darling: but I'd rather be natural"-Golightly. From the get go, Golightly expresses herself to the narrator like an open book. Her fears, insecurities, and wants are
"I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous.That's very much on my schedule, and sometime I'll get around to it; but if it happens I'd like my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine day and have breakfast at Tiffany's.","Be anything but a coward, a pretender, and emotional crook; a whore. I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Not to be pious, just being practical. Sure cancer will cool you, but the other's sure to kill you." Holly Golightly." The opportunities to rise to success and when tangled in compromising situations, save her own skin, were made available to Golightly. Fame, success, even a judicial pardon were obtainable to her, but she in everyone of these situations she chose to stick to her wits and innate nature. When confronted with the opportunity to travel to New York and potentially become a successful actress, she could have testified against Sally Tomato and been spared of jail time, but she chose to pursue what she found attainable by her means and what correlated most with her nature. Once again, in accordance to the atheistic existentialist being, she chose to confront her "angst rather than acting in bad faith and giving into the absurdity of conventions".

The most clearcut sign of Golightly's existential being is the relationship with her cat; the slob with no name, and in the theatrical version, that with Varjack.