Although Capote describes the Clutters as a symbolic representation of a perfect family, his importance is to show the difference of lifestyles from Perry coming from broken homes to the Clutters home therefore; he contends family life is a key determinant that can affect a person, later in life. Capote uses an anecdote to help his readers formulate where Perry came from and how he became abnormal. After Perry made an “admission he hated to make” of himself and Dick having to be crazy, after killing a perfect family, Capote says: “His mother an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit. Of her children two sons and two daughters, only the young girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life, married, begun raising a family. Fern the other daughter, jumped out the window of a San Francisco hotel. (Perry ever since ‘tried to believe she slipped,’ for he’d love Fern…And there was Jimmy, the older boy- Jimmy who had one day driven his wife to suicide and killed himself the next” (Capote 110-111). Telling the readers Perry’s background gives us more knowledge, and a reasoning of why he may have killed …show more content…
Perry who always has hunches is reading the newspaper and says, “Something tells me this is a trap” (Capote 90). Since Dick grew up with his parents taking care of him or covering for him, especially his father paying off his taxes when needed, he is not use to getting caught unlike Perry who had grown up teaching himself and had to face his consequences up front. Capote talks about Perry having this hunch to later tell the readers Perry was right along. When Perry is talking about his history of hunches and they were all true or saved him the readers can infer his hunches are viable and predict that his hunch on getting caught will too