Essay On In Cold Blood By Truman Capote

Written in 1965, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote chronicles the vicious and brutal murders of a family in the small, rural town of Holcomb, Kansas. News of the crime attracted dozens of detectives and journalists all with the intent of documenting and solving this horrific crime, Truman Capote being one of them. Capote provides a unique perspective of the story as he attempts to incorporate both fact from the crime and investigation itself, as well as inserting some fictional details into the lives of the criminals themselves. Throughout Capote’s novel, the story of two criminals executing a murder focuses on more than just the crime and the victims. Rather, Capote paints a picture of each murderer, allowing the readers to explore the criminals’

Capote takes the reader on an in-depth journey throughout the complex pasts of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith which allows the reader to truly understand how the murder was influenced by the lives that the two had led prior to that point. Many people, when presented with the idea that a man has murdered somebody, instinctively perceive him as a horrible, vicious person, which, yes, can be true. Capote wants to challenge this immediate assumption. Rather than giving the murderers a two-dimensional life and backstory, he challenges people's perceptions by giving them life stories that ignite pity, fear, sadness and anger. These emotions allow the reader to understand the true idea behind their actions, rather than instinctively thinking that there is no valid justification for murder. Capote challenges these ideas through the use of digressions, which he uses dozens of times throughout the book. In the beginning, one thinks that these insertions of the criminals’ backstories are a tangent, off topic, or simply filler. One may think this because, in general, people tend to link murderers to a 2D figure, one without a life or emotions,

Most readers find that in the beginning of the book, they feel no pity or mercy towards the killers, but by the end, they may have felt sympathy for them, or thought that their executions were too harsh a punishment, in stark contrast to beliefs at the beginning. This change takes place largely in the background, without the readers having knowledge of its happening or even being able to point to a specific thing that changed their minds. This all happens due to Capote’s biases towards Dick and Perry, being that he does believe that the pasts of the killers are in a fact a valid reason that one should take mercy on them. His biases seem subtle in the beginning, presenting themselves in his digressions which he uses to incite pity, but become more clear towards the end as Capote obviously detests the executions of the murderers. At the time of the execution, he inserts details of the gruesome hanging, even comparing the killers to children- a disturbing but powerful observation. Capote chronicles Dewey’s perception of the killers’ final moments, saying how “the dwarfish boy-man [sat] in the metal chair, his small booted feet not quite brushing the floor. And when Dewey now opened his eyes, that is what he saw: the same childish feet, tilted, dangling” (341). Likening the condemned to children shows that Capote detests the execution as something too