After reading the passage of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood you acquire the feeling of eeriness in a town that Capote reports as a “lonesome area”. By giving you this description of bland and monotonous Holcomb, Kansas he provides his take on the town in which he allows you to believe that the town is run down, boring, and outdated. Through Capote’s vivid use of imagery and attention to detail, he paints a graphic image to what end you view the story.
Throughout the first paragraph, the author gives explicit details that lead to astonishing imagery. Whether he talks of the “high wheat plains of western Kansas” or the “hard blue skies” this paints a picture of what this small town looks like while also giving descriptive characteristics
In Cold Blood is the true story of a multiple murder that rocked the small town of Holcomb, Kansas and neighboring communities in 1959. It begins by introducing the reader to an ideal, all-American family, the Clutters; Herb (the father), Bonnie (the mother), Nancy (the teenage daughter), and Kenyon (the teenage son). The Clutters were prominent members of their community who gained admiration and respect for their neighborly demeanors.
How can it be that four members of a family, such as the Clutters, could have been murdered in cold blood? Who would want to commit such a horrible crime? What could the killer’s motivation be? These are key points and questions for the book “In Cold Blood”.
Brian Conniff's article, "Psychological Accidents: In Cold Blood and Ritual Sacrifice," explains how Truman Capote's nonfiction novel demonstrates the psychological trauma that the murderers and the townspeople of Holcomb face after the murders of the Clutter family. Conniff begins his article by stating that in the last twenty-five years imprisonment and execution has reached an all-time high level of obsession among the American public. Since this type of violence has been so normalized it is rarely properly understood (1). With this in mind, prison literature has continually suggested that "the most fortified barriers are not the physical walls and fences between the prison, and the outside world; the most fortified barriers are the psychological walls between the preoccupations of everyday life . . .and the conscious realization that punishment is the most self-destructive kind of national addiction" (Conniff 1).
Truman Capote put-to-words a captivating tale of two monsters who committed four murders in cold blood. However, despite their atrocities, Capote still managed to sway his readers into a mood of compassion. Although, his tone may have transformed several times throughout the book, his overall purpose never altered.
Capote's structure in In Cold Blood is a subject that deserves discussion. The book is told from two alternating perspectives, that of the Clutter family who are the victims, and that of the two murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. The different perspectives allow the reader to relive both sides of the story; Capote presents them without bias. Capote masterfully utilizes the third person omniscient point of view to express the two perspectives. The non-chronological sequencing of some events emphasizes key scenes.
Reading In Cold Blood brought me a new literary and psychological understanding. I realized what such a heinous murder would do to a town like Holcomb, Kansas. I always took my childhood for granted; nothing bad happened in our town, nothing equal to the ugliness of the Clutter murder. After rereading In Cold Blood, I read every piece of literary criticism on the book as I could find. I began to consider the impact of Capote on today's based-on-fact books and movies. My goal was to discover whether the blurring of the line between truth and fiction has befogged how we, as readers and viewers, differentiate between truth and fiction.
Far Western than the Middle West there’s a small village called Holcomb that stands in the hard blue skies and crisp desert-clear air, some seventy miles east of the Colorado border. Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood writes about a small village that is dull and sluggish. Capote uses imagery and structure to hook you on the town as you read his novel.
“Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office.” (Capote pg. 19) When describing people, he normally tells what they wear and what expressions they have. When describing places, he will usually use the scenery to his advantage. “At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign -DANCE- but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years.” (Capote pg. 19) Capote mostly makes the town seem rundown and vacant. “No passenger trains do-only the occasional freight.” (Capote pg.19) Everything he describes is barren wasteland except for the school. “And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good-looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance of the community otherwise camouflages.” (Capote pg. 19) The new school is really what looks to be the only good thing about Holcomb
Truman Capote finds different ways to humanize the killers throughout his novel In Cold Blood. He begins this novel by explaining the town of Holcomb and the Clutter family. He makes them an honest, loving, wholesome family that play a central role in the town. They play a prominent role in everyone’s lives to create better well-being and opportunity. Capote ends his beginning explanation of the plot by saying, “The suffering. The horror. They were dead. A whole family. Gentle, kindly people, people I knew --- murdered. You had to believe it, because it was really true” (Capote 66). Despite their kindness to the town, someone had the mental drive to murder them. Only a monster could do such a thing --- a mindless beast. However,
In Cold Blood is a true account of a multiple murder case that took place in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959, written by Truman Capote. Capote’s attention to detail causes the reader to gain an extreme interest in the Clutter family even though they were an ordinary family. The suspense that is a result of minimal facts and descriptive settings was an elaborate stylistic technique that gave effective results throughout the book. His ability to make this account of a horrid crime more than just a newspaper description was a great success as a base of his many literary devices, not just is great focus to small details.
On pages 265-266 of Capote’s novel, In Cold Blood, Capote writes about Perry’s imprisonment, more specifically Perry’s mental health, or lack thereof. Capote uses an ominous tone to convey the predicament Perry was in and portray the mental instability possessed by Perry. Capote first discusses a failed escape plan of Perry’s that consisted of throwing a document with a detailed rescue plan down to two men who often gathered below his window, thinking that they were there for him. However, as soon as he created the document, the men stopped coming. The strangeness of this scenario pushed Perry to question his sanity. Regarding this, Capote says, “a notion that he ‘might not be normal, maybe insane’ troubled him” (Capote 265). When Capote says that these issues
In Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, the Clutter family’s murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, are exposed like never before. The novel allows the reader to experience an intimate understanding of the murderer’s pasts, thoughts, and feelings. It goes into great detail of Smith and Hickock’s pasts which helps to explain the path of life they were walking leading up to the murder’s, as well as the thought’s that were running through their minds after the killings.
The main purpose of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is to offer insight into the minds of the murderers of the Clutter family, Dick and Perry. However, asking an audience to be open-minded about men who have committed such heinous crimes is no easy task. Capote instead methodically and rather artfully combines imagery, parallel structure, and perspective in two separate passages found between pages 107-113 to contribute to his characterization of Perry and Dick where the former is deserving of sympathy and the latter, disgust.
In the nonfiction novel, “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote, the author tells a story of the murderers and victims of a slaughter case in Holcomb, Kansas. Instead of writing a book on the murder case as a crime report, the author decides to write about the people. The people we learn about are the killers, Dick and Perry, and the murdered family, the Clutters. The author describes how each family was and makes the portrayals of Dick and Perry’s family different from the Clutters.The portrayal of the Clutters and of Dick and Perry’s families, was used to describe what the American Dream was for each character. In the beginning we learn about what type of family the Clutters were and how they represented the American Dream for the people of Holcomb.
and at one point, had a gun pointed to his head. Also there appears to be