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IN COLD BLOOD BY TRUMAN CAPOTE IN COLD BLOOD by TRUMAN CAPOTE On the night of November 15, 1959, in the little town of Holcomb, Kansas, Herbert W. Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, and their teen-aged children, Nancy and Kenyon, were savagely murdered in their home by blasts from a shotgun held inches from their faces. wrote E. Fremont-Smith in his Books of the Times (10 January, 1966).
Herbert Clutter was found in the basement, his throat also slashed; Bonnie and Nancy were in their bedrooms; Kenyon had been propped up comfortably on a downstairs couch. There seemed to be no motive for the crime, and no useful clues. An initial suspect, Nancy Clutters young boy friend, was quickly released after a lie-detector test. A painstaking sifting of the Clutters livers, friends and acquaintances revealed nothing except that the Clutters seemed the least likely candidates for murder in all Kansas. The story begins earlier that same year. Capote paints a picture of an ordinary family a middle-aged farmer, his wife, their two youngest children living their lives together out in the west Kansas desert.
Truman Capote, describes the events preceding and following the murder of the Clutter family in their small town Kansas home. This "nonfiction novel" is based on events that truly happened but are portrayed novelistic ally. Capote depicts the thoughts, actions, and conversation of the killers in the weeks and hours before the murders. Also depicted is the homey domestic life of the doomed Clutter family, denizens of the good and virtuous life in small town Kansas. The details of the crime were gruesome enough. What makes it truly horrifying to the citizens of Holcomb was the lack of any visible reason for it.
The Clutters were not just any family; they were the most prosperous and respected family in the region, admired for their uprightness, piety, hard work and good deeds. Their wealth, from Herbert Clutters well-managed wheat farm, seemed almost a sign of grace; the children, Nancy and Kenyon, were everything American parents could want friendly, talented, generous, active in mind and body, excellent students. Bonnie suffered periods of depression, but had been a faithful wife for 25 years and was obviously a warm and capable mother and homemaker. A great many people knew the Clutters, and apparently there was not an enemy among them. That is one side of Truman Capotes remarkable, splendidly written "true account" the underserved, hideous slaughter of an ideal American family. On the other side, in subtle balance, is the story of their destroyers, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith.
They had never met the Clutters before entering their home and shooting them down, and afterward they scarcely bothered, scarcely were capable of covering their tracks. Capote lays out the story with apparent honesty, resisting the temptation to dress up the characters as romanticized heroes and villains. In particular, the reader is forced to view Perry Smith and Dick Hickock not as a pair of monsters, but as two human beings who happened to commit a disgraceful crime. They came from as different a world as you could find in rural America at the time.
Perry Smiths family was broken and violent. Hed lost two siblings to suicide, and a parent to alcoholism. Half-Cherokee, half-Irish, Smith had a "runty" build, thanks to a motorcycle accident that left him with disfigured legs and an addiction to aspirin and glorified daydreams. It was one of those daydreams that sent him out to the Clutter place: Perrys favorite movie was "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, " and he was certain that if he could only get to Mexico, hed find treasure of his own there. Capote gives us an empathetic and fascinating look at a murderers psyche through his portrait of Perry Smith. Though he suffers from a physical deformity as the result of an accident, has an interesting look about him: "It was a changelings face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic. " Dick Hickock's ambitions were slightly less delusional; he just wanted to take the money and run off somewhere he wouldnt be found.
Hickock was also scarred; a car accident had put an unnerving asymmetry into his otherwise handsome face. Hickock's family was poor but relatively stable. He had a penchant for passing bad checks, but the Clutter murders left his family confounded. The novel continues with efforts, eventually successful, of law enforcement and justice to identify, track down, arrest, interrogate, convict, and finally execute the killers is detailed, and the story ends with the visit of a family friend to the small country graveyard where the family was laid to rest. "In Cold Blood" is the result of six years of intensive interviewing, research and writing. It is reportage in a depth we have not seen before. As he told himself in interview to George Plimpton (1966): one morning in November, 1959, while flicking through The New York Times, I encountered on a deep-inside page, this headline: Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.
Truman Capote went to Kansas after reading about the Clutter murder in the newspaper, and, despite being most un-Kansan, was able to win the confidence of virtually everyone involved with the crime Clutter friends and neighbors, the police and eventually the murderers. He was on the courthouse steps when Hickock and Smith were returned to Holcomb. He visited them in jail, and at Smiths request, was present as a witness at their hanging. Part of Capotes equipment is his carefully trained memory: he took no notes while interviewing, and nothing was taped; instead, he listened, and thereby won extraordinarily candid accounts.
E. Fremont-Smith (10 January 1966) wrote in The New York Times Book Review, When "In Cold Blood" was published last fall in four installments in The New Yorker, it was preceded by an "Editors Note: All quotations in this article are taken either from official records or from conversations, transcribed verbatim, between the author and the principals. " (Transcribed verbatim in his head, that is). Capote wrote In Cold Blood as a literary experiment. He wanted to write a "nonfiction novel. " He felt that he was one of the rare creative people who actually took journalism seriously. The question is whether a book such as In Cold Blood is actually a novel, a creative work, or journalism. We can pinpoint several artistic aspects of In Cold Blood.
First, Capote has to make choices about the structure of the book. Capote chose a starting and ending point, and in between he choose the order and subject matter of the chapters. In the first section, "The Last to See Them Alive, " chapters on the activities of the Clutter family alternate with chapters on the preparations for murder being made by Hickock and Smith. Reading about Nancy Clutter baking an apple pie and then reading about the killers tattoos creates a montage, contrasting subsequent images to create a specific impression. The images of this tale continue to resonate in readers mind: 16 -year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black 49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smiths Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks. Among the matters the book raises are the chanciness of our individual existences, how people give in or override mutual suspicion, the mystery of how criminals are made and perhaps born, the irrelevancy of the legal concept of sanity, the issue of capital punishment and a host of theological questions.
But in center is what seems a crucial revelation of the dichotomy between the moral judgment of an act and the moral judgment of the person who commits it. suggested E. Fremont-Smith (1966). It is a dichotomy that is frightening and difficult to retain in mind; yet it seems the only coherent way to confront ones horror, ones condemnation of the crime and sorrow for the victims and ones sympathy for the perpetrators of the crime. Hanging Hickock and Smith was a possibly necessary practical solution, but moral condemnation of them, not just their brutal act, is impossible. Through Capote, we get to know them too well for that this also is what hurts, and what obviously hurt Capote.
What limited capacities these killers had, what mean and frightened lives they led, what hopeless yearnings and crippled, pathetic dreams. Did they have any more of a chance at anything than they gave their unsuspecting victims? In the novel, moments before being put to death, Smith, in a scene embellished by Truman Capote for dramatic effect, turned to Warden Crouse and said, "It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize. (p. 381) In arranging the facts of the Clutter case into a novel, Capote gave them a number of meanings.
Not only are some of Capotes opinions apparent, as in the case of his opposition to the death penalty, but the novel itself has several major themes. First, it is a commentary on the American Dream. Herb Clutter has made a wonderful life for himself his daughter, after all, bakes apple pies. But two petty criminals abruptly and arbitrarily shatter Herb Clutters American idyll. The American dream is fragile, and it only functions if marginal people are not present.
Published in 1965, this story about a senseless murder in 1959 that is so very relevant today. J. Knowles (April 1988) wrote in the issue of Esquire: "Capotes book held a mirror to a real-life happening and reflected it to readers all over the world. " (p. 176). Truman Capotes accomplishment must have been a truly labor as this very difficult story was so thoroughly researched and artfully composed into narrative.
The reader is directly exposed and steeped in the details of this murder I think in order to evoke empathy toward the victims and to a certain although much lesser degree the killers too. What is the point of this book? Simply stated I think this is a debate on whether capital punishment is ethical and whether the defense of insanity is applied in court in a fair manner. The issue of capital punishment is what makes this a uniquely American crime story. Capote portrays two murderers and one murder scene.
He goes into a vast amount of detail on the killers lives. The reader feels they know both murderers personally. The books subtext in my opinion is a series of debatable questions: Are these two killers equally responsible for the murders committed? Are both equally beyond redemption? Are both sane? These questions are left for the reader to decide.
By providing the reader with additional information on the killers backgrounds, childhoods, intimate details of the victims lives and deaths etc. , we acquire information that would never be allowed in court of law. In Malins (1968) Truman Capotes In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook, written: ... the book which grows from years of painstaking research is a social document of undeniable significance. It is also a major work of literature in its own right, for only a writer of exceptional talent could so skillfully have directed our attention to the larger issues which rest behind the facts of the case. (pp. 66 - 67). Conclusively, there is another, maybe stronger claim the book makes. The real world of America as revealed in this story has come to pass, is far more a matter of public fact than private vision.
Who today would deny that we live in a desperate, savage, violent America in collision with sane, safe, insular, even smug America? In that sense In Cold Blood can qualify as prophecy. References Capote, T. (1994). In Cold Blood.
New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Fremont-Smith, E. (1966, January 10). Books of The Times. The New York Times Book Review. Available: web Knowles, J. (1988, August). "Musings on a Chameleon." Esquire. Malin, I. , ed. (1968).
Truman Capotes In Cold Blood: A critical handbook. Belmont, Calif. : Wadsworth Publishing Co. Plimpton, G. (1966, January 16). The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel. The New York Times Book Review.
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Research essay sample on In Cold Blood By Truman Capote
