Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

Journalism is one of the forms of writing that tells the society about the events that really happened in the world. People got use to the idea that journalism is always based on the true facts with no fiction elements should involve. The book In Cold Blood written by the Truman Capote, about the murder of one family named Clutter, represents the journalism from the different side. In the book the author presented the new creative technique of journalism, with blending the journalism and fiction he created “New Journalism”. His validity of the new technique is supporting by the successful blend of the journalism and fiction, the excessive specific details and the literary elements in the story. With all these elements the Truman Capote achieved

The author did the excellent job in blending these barriers so that the reader cannot eve identify where the actual truth ends and fiction begins. One of these examples are in the in the begging of Part One where he introduced the vivid illustration of the city Holcomb in the state of Kansas. He described Kansas as “the village in seventy miles east of Colorado borders with population numbering two hundred and seventy.” (pg. 3) These are the actual facts that can be proved and are easy to check, but then author goes in specific description of this setting. The city of Holcomb has “a meagerly supply grosser store, a ramshackle mansion, filled with one story frame affairs” (pg. 4). In the begging Capote is started with the actual facts about the city of Holcomb, with its location and population, but then he added fictional elements to describe the setting. The adjectives were the key points to describe the city for the reader as quiet and small town with hidden stores on the streets. The reader, however, cannot see the barrier where the fiction and journalism meet and just read everything and analyze it. “Capote blurred the line between truth and untruth” (Van Jensen) to make the story to look more proficient and justify his goal about “New Journalism” with mixing the truth

When he characterized the characters in the book some of his descriptions were not similar to the real historical records that existed. For example in the book the author wrote that Perry Smith “was tattooed on his right biceps” (pg. 32) while in records it says that his left hand was tattooed. This mistakes made people to claim that Capote was not the professional journalist and claimed that “he never remembered what the actual percentage of recall he had” (Jack Shafer). However, by claiming this fact people failed to take into account that the Capote used literary language in his writing that created the book to look almost like a novel. Capote included many literary elements in the novel that made it to accomplish a goal of New Journalism. For example, one of the literary elements that author used in the book is the foreshadowing. The foreshadowing helped the reader to get the clues about what will happen in the future of the book and kept them attractive to the story. Capote describes Herbert Clutter's day he says "Then touching the brim of his cap, he headed for home and the day's work, unaware that it would be his last"(pg. 13). This foreshadowing the characters last day in life and make the reader to be interesting what will happen later on. This helped the novel to look like the “masterpiece”