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Essay On In Cold Blood By Truman Capote

489 Words2 Pages

Truman Capote expressed the events that occurred in real life in a haunting and horrifying way illustrating how scary the world really is. The book discusses two people who were both sane but hated the world with such a fiery passion that they murdered the Clutter family for pure joy. They hated the world so much that they wanted everyone else to hate it as well and consequently committed a crime so evil and full of hate. In the book In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, the author expresses how inhuman some people in the world are and how someone's ego drastically changes the way they view the world.

While reading the book In Cold Blood, one would think that the book must be fiction, due to how sinfully evil the murders of the Clutter family were. However, the book is nonfiction and that is what makes the murder of the Clutter family committed by Perry Smith and Dick Hickock so inhuman and immoral. Towards the end of the book Dick Hickock’s last words were “I just wants to say no hard feelings. You people are sending me to a better place than this world ever was.” (Capote.339). Capote specifically puts this quote in the book to show how Dick Hickcock was so immoral that the fact that he killed someone pleasured him and actually …show more content…

Towards the end of the book we see during Perry’s mental evaluation that he is “overly sensitive to criticisms that others make of him, and cannot tolerate being made fun of. He is quick to sense slight or insult in things others say” (Capote.297). Capote shows that Perry’s ego is so low that he tries to find a way to make himself feel like he’s better than everyone else. Eventually Perry finds a way to do this by boosting his ego, which is to kill the Clutter family, which helps him to feel superior and stronger than

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In Cold Blood, written by Truman Capote in 1966 tells the story of the murder of a prominent family in 60’s Kansas. Capote traveled to the small town of Holcomb, and befriended many of the townsfolk and the detectives involved in the trial to tell the story of a violent event that shaped this community for the decade until the eventual conviction and execution of the killers. Because of information being told, Capote makes the choice of writing his novel as if it were a news report. This journalistic structure and word choice helps to establish the serious and dark tone of the novel.

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In Truman Capote’s nonfiction text, In Cold Blood, the Herbert Clutter family was brutally murdered by two men by the name of Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith. Once the deaths of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter were found, almost no clues were present to link Hickock and Smith as the killers. Despite In Cold Blood being nonfiction, Capote writes as if the text is a novel using tone and diction to manipulate the reader’s mood, and engaging the reader. In custom, nonfiction books are written to state facts, which discourage people from reading it as they feel that nonfiction is not as amusing as reading a fiction book.

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In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, was a non-fictional novel published in 1965. Written in four parts, Capote meticulously details the brutal 1959 murders of the recognized farmer Herbert Clutter, Bonie Clutter, Nancy Clutter and Kenyon Clutter in the small, once peaceful, city of Holcomb, Kansas. Throughout the book, while Capote sympathetically depicts the murders of the Clutter family, we also realize that the author has a strong sympathy for one of the murders called Perry Edward Smith. Although the novel was intended to be written in a journalistic form, Capote seems to fictionalize much of the information used to write the novel in order to add suspense and certain reactions from the readers. Truman Capote’s new literary form of “the non-fictional novel” leaves the readers feeling conflicting emotions

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Option Three: Bias Truman Capote’s final book In Cold Blood, was an instant hit with readers when it came out in 1966. Capote himself hailed it as a new genre of literature, a nonfiction true crime thriller. However, upon reading the book, it seems as though Capote shifted the truth to make it fit his own personal narrative, and put in his own personal bias toward the criminals, and seeks to have the reader sympathize with the criminals and seeks to challenge their attitudes towards the criminals.

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Facts and Fiction: A Manipulation of Language in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood English is a fascinating and riveting language. Subtle nuances and adjustments can easily change the understanding of a literary work—a technique many authors employ in order to evoke a desired response from their readers. This method is used especially in In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, a literary work which details a true event about the murders of four members of the Clutter family in the small community of Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. Although Capote’s 1966 book was a bestseller nonfiction and had successfully garnered acclaim for its author, there is still a great deal of confusion about the distinction between the factual and fictional aspects in the book.

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