Analysis Of The Last To See Them Alive By Truman Capote

The human tendency to assume and stereotype is one of our most detrimental habits. In his piece, The Last to See Them Alive, Truman Capote tries to challenge this natural routine by presenting a dichotomous picture of a village in Western Kansas. He goes through the different aspects of said village and guides us alongside him on his quest to finding the truth. What will we find out? And does Capote finally achieve his goal? Capote opens up his piece with a wide-angled description of an ordinary village in Western Kansas. The reader is faced with an “advertisement [that] has been dark for several years,” “irrelevant sign[s],” and “a gaunt woman.” This grim description points out the unfamiliarity of this isolated village. It paints

We see a prosperous environment with “plentiful natural-gas resources,” “good-looking establishment[s],” and “born gamblers.” The writer shocks the reader by this severely dichotomous picture. Through that, the audience is kept “on their toes” eagerly waiting for any acute surprises this village might bring. This contrast serves the writer’s purpose by highlighting the differences of both the insider and outsider perspectives. Those same ‘lazy’ villagers are now successful businessmen, those banks that were almost falling to the ground are now flourishing with great amounts of wealth, and those institutions that were crumbling down to the floor are now top-tier schools. The change in perspective also highlights that the villagers are modest, close-knit, and isolationists. The like their village the way it is and so they shun away any outside intervention. They are also smart and thoughtful. Being in the midst of the Great Depression in the early 30s, they have kept this low-profile of seeming poverty and disgrace. They have relied entirely on their own resources to get out of the financial crisis (implying that they had suffered from it in the first place). The writer through showing this contrast is confessing a misstep that he committed when he first came to the village. A mistake that we, as his readers, were also made to commit: the faux pas of assumption. Capote when he first came down to the village was fooled by the concealing ornament. His whole two first paragraphs are nothing but a testament to the villagers’ ability: a pat on the back, a congratulation, an acknowledgment... The villagers are, in the writer’s eyes, masters of disguise. To report on their art as genuinely and as accurately as possible, he took us through a drawn-out description of both the outside and inside perspectives. It was all for the goal of giving their masterpiece the justice it