A Rhetorical Analysis Of In Cold Blood

Truman Capote's introductory passage from In Cold Blood(1966), asserts the town of Holcomb as a run-down town that every reader has seen before. Capote approaches this idea of familiarity and comfort of Holcomb through effective irony, shifts of mood, and blatant foreshadowing; acknowledging that this town isn’t ideal based on appearance but the community is what makes it the town that it is. He works to establish a sense of familiarity in the reader in order to evoke more emotion as they read through and learn what happened to the Clutter family. While Capote wasn’t a member of the Holcomb community through his research he was able to grow close with members of the town and gain the knowledge needed to write this story intended for an audience

Capote sets up the reader, putting them at peace to read about the Holcomb residences being “quite content to exist inside ordinary life” (Capote 5). Establishing this feeling of familiarity early on in the book makes the reader feel terrified, not only as they read through the rest of the story but as they finish up the introductory passage. Peace and comfort are soon destroyed when Capote leads to the murder, describing the night of the murder to contain “certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises---on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dryscrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles” (Capote 5). That build quickly changes the mood that the reader has from peace to fear. He wants to make the reader feel like this could happen to them in their town and that nobody is safe, not even the ideal American family. This change in emotion was intended by Capote to make In Cold Blood read more like a fictional novel rather than a non-fiction book, creating the new genre Capote was set on

Capote hints at the change in this neighborhood through foreshadowing, he also emphasizes it through the repetition of the word strange. This town is losing the normality that it had and it isn’t just neighbors becoming strangers to each other but the town becoming a stranger to its occupants. In a time of need where they should be able to lean on each other to heal they will feel as though they can’t trust anyone, a message that Capote works into every bit of the book because he saw how the town didn’t only lose the Clutter family but they lost the trust they had in their town until the case was