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In Cold Blood Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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In the book “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote, Capote blantly describes the murderous acts of two men who killed an entire family they knew nothing about. The Clutters were good people who had no intention on hurting anyone. Dick and Perry, the murderers, had no reason to do this, meaning they had no motive for these actions and they can not be excused for their actions. In the beginning of the book, Capote introduces everyone to the Clutter Family, and a few pages further into the book he introduces everyone to Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. The Clutter family includes the Mr. and Mrs. Clutter and their four wonderful children. The youngest are two teenagers Nancy and Kenyon, and the oldest two adult daughters known as Eveanna and Beverly. Capote describes these people as calm, loving church going, cherishable innocent people and have not done anything to hurt anyone. Capote describes Dick as an intelligent murderer. No one understands why Dick and Perry killed them, but on the other hand, he portrays Dick and Perry as the perfect murderers knowing how to get away with it. Dick is motivated by carnal impulses and he is the mastermind and investigator to the murders, he isn’t very educated but he is street-wise and charming. Perry on the other hand grew up with difficult circumstances, he was abandoned …show more content…

For example Nancy’s tone is cheerful and she likes to help everyone ad she’s a star student in school. And everyone had a different tone towards everything. You can take tone as a matter of attitude. Some people have different tones on life no one has the same outlook on life. Capote has a bunch of selection of detail. With all of those strategies it brings this whole book together. He chose to write a book about a murder that happened in Holcomb,Kansas and he gave very specific details when he got to describing the

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Perry was the one who actually killed the Clutters, and Dick was just a bystander. Initially, Dick is the one comes up with the plan to kill the Clutters and when it’s time to kill the Clutters, he backs out. As the Clutters are going on with their everyday lives, the two men are driving to the town of Holcomb, where the family lives. A friend of Nancy’s from school, Nancy Ewalt, was dropped off at the Clutter’s to go to church. Upon entering the home, Nancy and Mrs. Kidwell, who works at the teacherage, realize the Clutters have not done anything they normally did on Sunday mornings.

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Dick from In Cold Blood maintained that he was less guilty and did not deserve the death penalty. In stating this, Dick was not correct that he was less guilty. There are justifiable proofs that diminish his chances of being less guilty. These proofs are found within the book and can be represented through his demeanors and actions prior to and after the night. Richard Eugene Hickock (Dick) in In Cold Blood is just as guilty as Perry in that he had clearly displayed his intent for killing the Clutter family.

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The most important event in the book, In Cold Blood is the Clutter family being murdered. Without the Clutter family being murdered, there would be no book. Originally Dick and Perry’s plan was to rob the Clutter family, which wouldn’t have been as big of a deal to anyone except the people in Holcomb, Kansas. The whole book is centered around the killings so without the murders taking place this book would not have been written or it would have been written about a robbery, which would make it less interesting.

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During his career, Truman Capote had become extremely interested in crime and the origins of homicidal mentality. In 1959, Capote read a column in the newspaper that mentioned the investigation of the four murders in Kansas. From this column, he became motivated to write an account of a true murder case. The information in the novel is very credible considering the amount of research that the author performed.

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• Tone – Throughout this novel, Capote’s tone towards the case stayed objective yet compassionate. It seemed as if he wanted to capture every single moment of each character’s points of view. “Know what I think?” said Perry. “I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did.”

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They maintain the utmost integrity and virtue when it comes to family life and this is reflected in Mr. and Mrs. Clutter’s kind, giving, and somewhat perfect children. From this quote we can conclude that Capote wrote this novel to show how our culture of our childhood can affect our way to live,think ,and act. Which is the case of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. More than that, this quote contributes to the overall theme of The Dynamics of Family

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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

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Even after going to jail Dick continued on a bad path, committing crimes for money. He also had terrible hobbies such as pursuing young girls and running over stray dogs. Perry had an unfortunate family situation his mother was an alcoholic who died from strangling to death on her vomit. One of his sisters committed suicide by jumping out of a window and his brother also killed himself. He had a the tendencies of a child and was a very hard person to read.

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The shocking murder of the Clutter family caught the nation’s attention, especially world-renowned American author, Truman Capote. Capote tells the story of the infamous crime in his world novel, In Cold Blood. The story is told as a sense of literature, more than just stating the events that happened such a documentary style. Capote referred to his masterpiece as “New Literature” as a way to captivate the audience with his way of writing about a true story in a story-telling manor. Capote spent years of research, analysis, and evidence to compose the novel in a way that would get readers interested and dig deeper into the crime itself and the minds of the criminals behind it.

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A genre classifies books with similar characteristics and style together. Nonfiction is a type of genre that means that all statements in that book are factual. In Cold Blood, written by Truman Capote, is considered nonfiction, but there are many critics who think it contains elements of fiction. There are various flaws in the book that deny its nonfiction claim. Indeed, it is true that this book is based on a true account, but Capote’s descriptions seem too detailed to be true.

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“‘I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did’” (Capote 108). This quote from Perry Smith (one of the infamous Clutter family murderers) was more accurate than one would think. In the novel In Cold Blood, Perry and his partner, Dick Hickock, murdered the family of Herbert William Clutter when they raided his house in search of a money safe in which Mr. Clutter did not own.

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In Cold Blood is a nonfiction novel by Truman Capote, first published in 1966. The book’s content narrates the account of the savage killing of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. Capote spent six years researching and interviewing the people involved in the case, and the resulting book is a detailed account of the crime and its aftermath, as well as a portrait of the two killers, Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith. “It seems that for Capote the American society has always been intrigued by the phenomenon of crime, the mystery surrounding it, as well as the suspense connected with crime stories” (Wróbel 8). Capote effectively establishes a sense of intimacy with the characters and their motives through his immersive and descriptive

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Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, focuses on a quiet town in eastern Kansas where the slaughter of the Clutter family occurred. Although Perry is a brutal murderer, he is the result of his troublesome past; therefore, indicating that the past plays a part in the character of one's future self. Throughout his childhood, Perry has encountered abuse, separation, and abandonment from his home and it directly affected who he has become. The way that Capote writes about Perry’s past makes it evident that it was miserable.

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How crazy would it be to interview criminals who murdered 4 people in cold blood? Well that’s exactly what Truman Capote did in this chilling book. In the novel In Cold Blood, Truman Capote used different rhetorical strategies to create sympathy and influence the idea that there are always two sides to every story. Some of the mainly used rhetorical strategies throughout the novel were imagery, diction, tone, and pathos. Furthermore, Capote also illustrated sympathetical emotion towards both types of characters, the protagonists and antagonists.

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He is portrayed as a mastermind in the cold-blooded killing of the Clutters family, a man with little respect for the lives of others, which can be seen through Dick’s expression before the murder of the Clutters when he converses Perry, “We’re gonna go in there and splatter those walls with hair” (Capote 234). This sudden tone shift enables Capote to depict Dick as a cruel and immoral character. Dick’s lack of empathy and concern for other people beside himself allow him to commit crimes without remorse, which is in contrast to Perry’s moral contemplation after each bad actions they committed. Moreover, Dick is represented as the true criminal with evident motives in murdering the Clutters, while Perry is seen as a vulnerable victim who depends on Dick for validation and acceptance, something in which Dick happily provides in order to manipulate Perry, as Capote writes, “Dick became convinced that Perry was that rarity, ‘a natural born killer,’—absolutely sane but conscienceless, and capable of dealing with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows. It was Dick's theory that such a gift could, under his supervision, be profitably exploited” (Capote 205).

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