Who Is The Perception Of The Clutters In In Cold Blood By Truman Capote

Capote draws his own perceptions about the Clutters throughout the novel. Though he claims that most of his novel is written in third person omniscient, where the narrator is all knowing and all seeing, many can argue against this. In Cold Blood, unlike a fictional novel, portrayed actual people and true events. When Capote decided to dwell inside the minds of his characters and write about their inner thoughts and feelings, he took liberties with actual people, not devised characters. Since he chose to write from the perspective of the deceased family, no approach that he could have used would have entirely aggregated the thoughts and feelings of the Clutters, making his third person omniscient narrative questionable. Although one of the

However, over the past few decades people have begun to question the validity of the objectivity of In Cold Blood. One such person is Joe Berlinger, the director of ‘Cold Blooded’ a documentary full of first hand accounts of the Clutter murders. In an interview in Mel Magazine, Joe Berlinger stated that they want their perspective “to allow them to set the record straight, and to air their disappointment in how Capote treated the family”(MEL). Berlinger’s documentary has spotlighted the vast difference between Capote’s accounting and that of the family’s. As Berlinger says, Capote’s over humanization of the criminals has done a disservice to the Clutters and caused the Clutter family to feel more like a side note. This has brought immense change to the way people view the murders of the Clutters. In more recent years people have become aware of the emotional price that the surviving relatives of the Clutter family have paid, leading to a closer examination of the novel and its

These interviews revealed a new side to the story that focuses more on the victims of the murder and the impact on the people living in Holcomb who are still affected by the publicity of “In Cold Blood”. These stories shed light not only on the way that Capote perceived them but also on the way that others not mentioned in the novel viewed the Clutters. Interviews such as these ones illuminate the victims and broaden the scope of understanding of the Clutters. They also demonstrate that Capote’s novel was only one version of the events, but many other accountings exist, constituting “In Cold Blood” as a subjective analysis rather than the objective