Summary Of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

The immersive story In Cold Blood, which was written by Truman Capote, shared the gruesome details of a murder in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 where four members of the Cuttler family were killed. First and foremost, Capote starts the book by describing the small, quiet town of Holcomb and describes the Cuttler’s lives such as Herb Cuttler’s successful farming business, Keyon and Nancy Cuttler’s lives at high school, Bonnie Cuttler’s struggle with depression, and Eveanna and Beverly Cuttler who have moved out of their parents’ home. However, he also portrays two men, recently had been released out of the Lansing, Kansas prison, named Perry Smith and Richard “Dick” Hickock who have met while serving their time and during Dick’s time in prison, he

Thus, he illustrates how the peaceful town looked, however dove deeper into what was happing inside the minds of the townspeople after such a tragedy. Hence, Capote used rich imagery to depict the peaceful plains that surrounds the town to contrast I later with the frightened, frantic minds of people soon after. Furthermore, Capote describes the peaceful morning of the Clutter’s before they were all murdered early morning the next day. For instance, Capote wrote when describing Mr. Clutter’s morning, “It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms,” which showed Kansas’ serene and beauty only hours before the tragedy (8). Therefore, the use of imagery allows the reader to feel the disbelief the murders had upon the quite town and shows the drastic differences between before and after the incident. Nevertheless, Capote turned the attention to the killers where they were experiencing the same beautiful morning as the Clutter’s, ““Christ!” said Perry, glaring at the landscape, flat and limitless under the sky’s cold, lingering green—empty and lonesome except for the far-between flickerings of farmhouse

Thus, throughout the book he investigates mental illness as it was one of the possible causes of the crime. Moreover, he explores the political issues that come with the Death Penalty and who is eligible to be in such a position, in which such issues are still prevalent to today as it was in the 1960’s. For example, Capote introduces Lowell Lee Andrews who killed his entire family and was acquainted with both Dick and Perry while in prison, all waiting to go to the gallows. For that reason, when describing Andrews psychopathic tendencies using asyndeton, “Andrews suffered no delusions, no false perceptions, no hallucinations, but the primary illness of separation of thinking from feeling. He understood the nature of his acts, and that they were prohibited, and that he was subject to punishment,” (308). Similarly, he uses the same organization using asyndeton when he described Perry’s paranoid schizophrenia, “Spells of helplessness occurred, moments when he "remembered things"—blue light exploding in a black room, the glass eyes of a big toy bear—and when voices, a particular few words, started nagging his mind: "Oh, no! No, please! No! No! No! No! Oh, please don't, please!" and certain sounds returned—a silver dollar rolling across a floor, boot