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The Opening Of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

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In the opening of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote creates an image of the town of Holcomb, Kansas. Through his stylistic elements such as diction, selection of detail, and tone, Capote’s view of Holcomb paints an image of a small ordinary town life. This distant and dull picture of this farm community he constructs shows that this type of crime could have happened anywhere. The narrator, who is Capote himself, uses quotation marks or other certain words to show how the Holcomb School is a good looking learning environment but has a side no one really notices, such as the parents who send their children to this modern staffed “consolidated” school, as a form of selection of detail. Another form of Capote’s clear selection of detail would be when he expressed the village of Holcomb as a lonesome area others call “out there”. In the beginning of the fourth paragraph when Capote states “And that, really, is all”, has a powerful effect that he wants to give in the reader’s head to show that the town is nothing special and not out the ordinary. …show more content…

Capote wants the town to sound as boring as you are reading this opening. He utilizes an objective tone when he states “Like the waters of a river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe Tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there”. Capote groups very ordinary life and all of its behaviors in order to demonstrate how typical the town is between Holcomb and the reader’s

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How does Capote describe the town? Note the diction that is used. Consider the description on page 4: “Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its peeling sulphur-colored paint, is

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Right off of Route 50, Holcomb is viewed as a ghost town. The author, Capote, uses the reader's vision to paint the scene. He ventures through the rundown main street of Holcomb, even using dashes to point out important parts of the town. He does when he explains the bank “dirty window-HOLCOMB BANK.” His

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“He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had—a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City's First Methodist Church,a congregation totaling seventeen hundred ,most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire.’’ (10) ( Culture and Community ) Capote used this quote to illustrate the culture of the village of Holcomb, where Mr.Clutter lived and how the social life of a religious family is rooted in their church. This quote represents culture, because is trying to tell us that people in Holcomb should live a life according to their religion ,because their actions affect their social circle and their community.

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This Quote shows the effect that the murder of one of the most popular and well liked in Holcomb. It also begins to foreshadow the suspicion that the town members will feel towards each other while they believe that there is a murderer in their midst, and if they treat their well acquainted neighbors with that much hostility then how will the treat the outsiders that are the real murderers.

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