What Is The Difference Between Bonnie And Clyde

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It has been said that there are three sides to every story: yours, theirs, and the truth. Sometimes all sides are not told, but it is guaranteed that at some point in time the truth will come to light. The infamous story of the bank-robbing dynamic duo Bonnie and Clyde is no different. In recent times, if you ask someone about the pair they will either speak of them highly while recounting some of the crimes that they committed as necessities to get through hard times, or said person will see them as barbaric, good-for-nothing burglars who did nothing but rape innocent citizens and steal their belongings for no reason at all. The truth actually lies somewhere in between the two perspectives. Bonnie Parker's poem The Trail's End and W. D. Jones' …show more content…

Through her work she attempts convey the message that her and Clyde are not as cruel as the media makes them out to be: "There's a lot of untruths to these write-ups; they're not as ruthless as that". In one part of the poem she states that it is not Clyde's fault that he is the way he is but in fact the law's fault: "But I say this with pride that I once knew Clyde, when he was upright and clean. But the law fooled around; kept taking him down, and locking him up in a cell. Till he said to me; "I'll never be free, so I'll meet a few of them in hell"". Bonnie does this to build up the sympathy of the public and to get them on the gang's side so that they would not be exposed when they were moving to new locations. The message makes it appear as if the gang just had a problem with the law and would only take on large establishments like banks, but W. D. Jones' account tells otherwise in his voluntary statement from …show more content…

In Parker's poem she writes about how Clyde once joked to her saying "...we're joining the NRA", or National Recovery Administration, to receive government jobs. Bonnie at that point realized that she was no longer considered a citizen and was now seen as a filthy thug as she continues in The Trail's End: "If they try to act like citizens and rent them a nice little flat. About the third night; they're invited to fight, by a sub-gun's rat-tat-tat". Similarly, Jones' statement includes a story such as the one from the poem. He recalls how "They [Buck and Blanche Barrow] rented a house at Joplin where we stayed about two weeks". During those two weeks everyone laid low and life was peaceful. Of course, in time, the police were alerted of their whereabouts and didn't hesitate to open gunfire on the mob leaving them wounded. W. D. also gladly mentions that he in fact did not have a gun during the encounter with the officers: "I did not have any gun, because I had not been carrying any kind of gun after the man had been killed in Temple, Texas on Christmas Day". In Bonnie’s opinion they were just trying to act like regular people and mind their business, but it was the "no good" law that had to end their paradise. Parker includes the stanza about the police shooting at the gang to add that at this point her

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