Argument Essay: In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood Argument Essay In Cold Blood focuses on the effects of the murder of a family in a city in Kansas as well as the interactions between their murderers. The book focuses a great deal on Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the Clutter family killers. Perry is painted throughout the book as a very complex character, the farther into the book one reads, the more details about his childhood and family are revealed. His childhood was traumatic for him and later in the book, that is explored as the reason for his behaviour. Dick is a complex character as well, however, his childhood was nothing like Perry’s, he had a good life, he was in every sport in highschool and his parents loved him. The book explores their thoughts and interactions …show more content…
This is crucial to the argument because the exposition lays the foundations for the argument. The possibility of the argument later in the book is reliant on the writers portrayal on Dick and Perry. The book not only focuses on the night they drove to Holcomb and killed the Clutters, but focuses on what they do afterwards and their past experiences, their childhood memories and the talk of their families. All these attribute the humanization of Dick and Perry. The description of the Clutters conveys the message that they were the good “All American Family”, which argues that the family did not deserve what happened to them. The complex way that the murderers are written almost makes one feel pity for Perry. The book analyzes the life of Perry before the night of the murders. His past is a very complex one that traumatized him. He was beaten when he peed the bed even though he had weak kidneys, his siblings committed suicide, and his remaining sibling wanted nothing to do with him, which all contributes to the argument later in the book that maybe he was insane because of his unfair and brutal childhood. Even as a child he fabricated things in his head to help him escape the torment of his world, he imagined “ ...that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a