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Narrative nonfiction writing essay
Narrative nonfiction writing essay
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In Cold Blood Analysis
In the excerpt from “In Cold Blood”, author Truman Capote describes the quaint little village of Holcomb and how the prosperity can be overlooked by the overwhelming drabness of the rest of the town. After bringing the reader into the setting, Capote mentions a tragedy that will soon stir things up in this boring little town.
First Capote starts by giving the reader insight on Western Kansas, saying “this land is flat”, telling us about the “high wheat plains” and how “other Kansans call [it] “out there.” He then moves on and gets more specific, with the village Holcomb. Capote’s imagery and diction gives off a certain melancholy vibe, depicting the town as lifeless and drab. This is a clear description of the small village in order to show the reader the dull and “melancholy” vibe that is given off, talking of the “irrelevant” and “haphazard” buildings that
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fill it. Capote’s structure is set up as if he is simply walking in Holcomb and telling the reader what he sees as he makes his way through the “unnamed, unshaded, unpaved” and unplanned streets. Truman Capote goes into such detail in order to have the reader truly understand that not much goes on in the little town of Holcomb, once they know that, then they can begin to visualize it and also know why the tragedy he hints at is such a big deal. While preparing his audience for what comes next, Capote decides to mention the wealth that is hidden in the village.
As much as the town is melancholy, some of it’s residents are wealthy. These are the people where “money has been made not from farming alone”, but also from the “exploration of plentiful natural-gas resources” and now, the new school reflects that very wealth. Now the reader is perplexed with the weird contradiction that school brings. This brand new, state of the art school, for kindergarten through senior high, is placed in this town where the buildings are ramshackled and falling apart. This creates an unusual predicament for the reader causing them to question the setup of the town. This new school provides the author with a shift in tone at this point of the story, which provides the reader with even more insight as to what the little village of Holcomb, Kansas looks like. Here the author cares for the audience's needs. In the intro of the book, he wants to make sure the reader is emerged into the setting, in order to fully understand the context of the
story. After making sure the audience is taken care of and comfortable, Capote then begins to introduce the main plot by utilizing a mysterious tone and diction. The way that Capote goes about telling the story suggests that something is coming, but he is not yet ready for the audience to know every detail. The last paragraph foreshadows the tragedy that will later come as the book progresses. His structure is like a mother saying “you can have a cookie, but not until you eat your dinner first”, just like the reader needs to get through the important background information first. The way that Capote understands what the audience needs helps him keep them drawn in and wanting more. He ultimately stirs up the imagination of the reader in the last paragraph of the excerpt, forcing his audience to keep reading. The suspense he uses, after laying down his foundation, adds to his overall omniscient persona that guides the reader through the story.
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.
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.
Truman Capote uses a simile in order for the readers to visualize what the scenery looks like. He compares the country to a lake using the word “as.”
In Cold Blood tells an exact story of the murder of the clutter family that occurred in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. It consists of Mr. and Mrs. Clutter and their two teenage children, Kenyon and Nancy, and the events that lead the killers to murder. The family was brutally killed, without any apparent reasons, by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. The family was found shot to death, with very little items missing from the home. Capote read about the crime in The New York Times real soon after it had happened, and before the killers were caught, he began his work in Kansas, interviewing the people of Holcomb and doing extensive research with the help of his friend Harper Lee. Dick and Perry got away with the murders, because of the lack of clues and no personal connections with the murdered family. Perry Smith is a loner, a psychic cripple, almost from birth an outcast from society. Capote insists the reader’s sympathy for Perry Smith from the outset: Comparing him to wounded animals; described as a frightened “creature” than as a human being responsible for his actions (Hollowell 82). So much suffering could be taken and given by a single youthful human...
In an excerpt from “In Cold Blood”, Truman Capote writes as an outside male voice irrelevant to the story, but has either visited or lived in the town of Holcomb. In this excerpt Capote utilized rhetoric to no only describe the town but also to characterize it in order to set a complete scene for the rest of the novel. Capote does this by adapting and forming diction, imagery, personification, similes, anaphora, metaphors, asyndeton, and alliteration to fully develop Holcomb not only as a town, but as a town that enjoys its isolation.
In Cold Blood, a novel written by Truman Capote and published in 1966, is, though written like fiction, a true account of the murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. This evocative story illuminates new insights into the minds of criminals, and how society tends to act as a whole, and achieves its purpose by utilizing many of the techniques presented in Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. In In Cold Blood, Capote uses symbols of escape and American values, and recurring themes of egotism and family to provide a new perspective on crime and illustrate an in-depth look at why people do the things they do.
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.
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,
Capote transitions next into a reflective and somewhat didactic tone in the second chapter. The author begins to give the reader a more in-depth understanding of every character's situation and opinion. This chapter has a sequence of interviews with the townspeople which better illustrates the public ...
Steinbeck and Hodgins both examine the idea of “promised land” where their characters, Steinbeck’s Joad family and Hodgins’s returned soldiers, hope to find both joy and prosperity. The characters, however, later learn that the idea of the “promised land” is simply just that - an idea - because it does not exist. While the “promised land” is different in both novels, it being a beautiful home and paying jobs in The Grapes of Wrath and actual land for settlement in Broken Ground, it represents the same hope for both novels – the hope of new, positive beginnings. Both Steinbeck and Hodgins lead readers to believe that the relocation of their characters is setting the stage for a turn of events in their lives, a turn for the better. This change, though, ...
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.
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.
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.
Capote never intended for In Cold Blood to be a documentary of the multiple murder that happened in the small town of Holcomb. When Capote published his novel, people where not familiar with non-fiction novels. People knew of the murders that had happened and started criticizing the book for not being truthful to what had really happened. This novel can not be looked at as journalism, which is often the mistake people made and still make today. Although there are many facts within the novel, the story that is being told is not always credible. Capote has also been criticized for his method of gathering information, because he did not take notes or record his interviews. Capote said that he had tested himself and that he had a 95% memory recall, but this was not always trusted by critics.Capote had made a mistake by telling the public that every word in the novel was true, this just opened him up for critics and journalists to challenge his bold statement.
In 1966, Truman Capote published the novel In Cold Blood that pierced the boundaries of literary genres, as he narrated the events of the 1959 Clutter family massacre in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas and the quest that took place afterwards through the perspectives both the murderers and those looking for them. As Capote bends these genre normalities, he ventures with the killers and the detectives and describes the murderers’ lives in-depth to further characterize Dick Hickock and Perry Smith--their psychological states and the possible contributing factors to their undeniable personality disorders. The two killers are ultimately diagnosed by a mental health professional with mental illnesses rather than chronic personality disorders,