Natalie DeBlaey Mrs. Legner True Crime Studies in Literature 8th March 2024 The Ties Between Childhood & Adulthood Alice Miller, a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher known for her parental child abuse books, once said, “An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never closes over and may start to bleed again at any time.” In Cold Blood by Truman Capote can be compared to Alice Miller's quote that unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never close Capote investigates the mental states of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the murders in the book. Unrecognized traumas from their pasts influenced their ability to carry out this crime. Truman Capote's nonfiction book In Cold Blood tells the terrifying murder of the Clutter …show more content…
This information was brought up in court, “‘And that was in 1949. Yet now you tell us your son had a change in his attitude and conduct after 1950?” (Capote 293). This is a turning point in Dick Hickock's life. It seems he had a stable childhood until the car accident in 1950. Dick was well supported by his parents and had little to no punishment. After this accident, he was not the same, and his parents thought he changed and was no longer the same person because he began passing fake checks. Dick, up until the car accident, was living the average American Dream and thought he was going places. Nevertheless, the questioning highlights a shift in his behavior before the car accident, implying it did not entirely alter his personality and decision-making abilities. Capote, including Dick’s traumatic experiences, can allow readers to understand the effect on a person's psyche, potentially leading them down a path they might not have taken otherwise. Concluding the sentence. Even with Dick’s supported and well-brought-up childhood, he still did not make the best …show more content…
I’m no goddamn killer. I never touched a hair on a human head’” (Capote 325). Dick is mentally not correct, and he thinks that the whole reason that Perry killed the Clutters was because Perry schemed him into it. Dick believes that under the law, he is innocent because it technically was not his hand that did the killing. Throughout the novel, Dick thinks he is a cunning, invincible man who can escape from anything. Dick carries that mentality with him to his death when he shakes hands with the people who were going to watch him die. Dick died thinking that he should be out of jail and should be roaming free. He is the opposite of Perry. He does not just accept what he did, like Perry, and realizes that what he did was wrong. He instead ignores the fact that he is just as guilty as Perry until he dies. Additionally, Dick made bad decisions that he was apparently unable to control in adulthood. Capote expressed Dick’s pedophiliac tendencies by writing, “He was sorry he felt as he did about her, for his sexual interest in female children was a failing of which he was ‘sincerely ashamed’” (Capote
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.
Dick Hickock was the twisted individual who planned the invasion into the Clutter’s home and pushed for the gruesome policy of “no witnesses.” Unlike his partner in crime, Perry, Capote wrote Dick as an utterly unlikeable man with seemingly no redeeming qualities, no glimpse of humanity, and, above all, no feelings of regret. A court psychiatrist surmises that Dick suffers from “ a severe character disorder” which causes him to “seems obviously uninfluenced by [his moral standards] in his actions, [have] a pathological inability to form and hold enduring personal attachments”, “cannot tolerate feelings of frustration as a more normal person can”, have “a very low self-esteem”, and makes Hickock “feel inferior to others and sexually inadequate…these
Richard Mulcaster, a British instructor of English, once wrote, “Nature makes the boy toward, nurture sees him forward.” Mulcaster recognizes that both genetic and environmental factors determine the type of a person one becomes. Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood gives the reader an opportunity to see prime examples of how nature and nurture influence one’s character. Capote’s novel, In Cold Blood introduces the reader to two men; Richard Eugene Hickock known as Dick throughout the novel, and Perry Edward Smith whose lives of crime are almost identical; although both Perry and Richard come from very humble backgrounds, their childhood particularly their family life, has very little in common. It is not until later in their lives that we begin to see similarities between the two men. Despite their differences, Perry’s upbringing and Dick’s genetic disposition allow both men to share a disregard for life, which becomes apparent on the night they gruesomely burglarized and murdered four innocent members of the Clutter family.
When first describing Dick and Perry, Capote describes dick as “an athlete constructed on a welterweight scale. The tattooed face of a cat, blue and grinning, covered his right hand…More markings…ornamented his arms and torso.” The metaphor comparing Dick to a welterweight athlete gives the perception that Dick is a mean looking guy. Basically, what a stereotypical criminal looks like; and that is exactly what Dick is. At the end of the passage, after describing Dick’s car colli...
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,
Dick had a good life going, he just didn't feel like it went the way he wanted it too. He was popular, smart, an athlete just wasn't enough for him. On the other hand, Perry had a bad life. He was between foster homes, and even had his siblings and father commit suicide while his mother drank herself away. Putting all that together i learned that, Nurture plays the biggest role in life. It has the ability to determine weather you turn a good life into and complete wreak such as Dick Hickock had. In a way it also applies to Perry considering his life was a wreck all the way
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.
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.
By structuring his novel where time is out of joint, Dick is able to illustrate that one’s perception of reality is entirely based on what one believes to be fact. This point is illustrated through Ragle Gumm, who, “from his years of active military life” in the beginning of the story, “prided himself on his physical agility” (Dick 100). It is not until time is mended again toward the end of the book that he realizes that it had been, in fact, his father that had served in the war. This demonstrates how one’s firm belief can turn into a reality, as it did for Ragle Gumm for the two and a half years he lived in the fabricated city of Old Town.
..., fellow boot blacks, and himself. He proved that who you know, and how well they know you, truly makes a drastic impact on how people succeed in America. In this sense, Ty Kiisel is right, but it also took a smidge of prior insight of Dick to acquire the right connections. Ragged Dick always keeps a keen eye on his morality, never letting it pull him into the wrong crowd.
Dick presents our main character, Commissioner John Anderton, as the balding, pot-bellied founder of a revolutionary new crime detection system who's been showing his years for longer than he'd care to remember. In the short story, he has just acquired a new assistant, Ed Witwer, and fears being replaced by the younger man. In the beginning, Anderton is portrayed as slightly insecure about his job (to the point of near paranoia of being set-up), as well as his importance to society, though by the e...
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,
From 1863-1877, the federal government undertook a monumental task to heal a broken nation torn by war. The policy of reconstruction would take a strong leader, determined to maintain the rights of the individual states, and heal the Union. While Lincoln’s original plans outlined his goals and views for reconstruction, following Lincoln’s assassination, his successor Johnson didn’t share the same resolve and was more swayed by radical factions within Congress and the current economic state of the country to forge his own political agenda.