Analysis Of Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood'

Plot/Structure: From the begininng of the novel, one can already see that a murder is going to happen, for Part I is labeled as “The Last to See Them Alive.” Capote, through his vast descriptives, takes his time to get to the murder scene itself. He takes the time to describe the town of Holcomb and the Clutter family, as well as introducing the murderers themselves, before telling about the crime. Capote describes the day that the Clutters died, from the start of the day until its end in great detail, so that the reader gets to know the Clutter family. The reader knows that the Clutter family were the victims of the crime and Dick and Perry were the perpetrators, yet Capote drags it out for as long as he can. This in itself builds the suspense, because the reader is waiting to read about exactly what happened. Another case of suspense is Capote 's intentional skipping of certain details. One chapter showed the Clutters, each with a gunshot wound in their heads, without going on to …show more content…
He was heavily invested with journalism when he was young, and thought that he should take the arts of the world and its news and combine it with the other fine art of storytelling. This genre is of grand importance because it crosses and combines the borders of two completely diverse genres. Capote created his great nonfiction novel because of his journalism-involved past, yet he has still fictionalized the fatual events to make the readers feel empathy and make the novel a story. Also, he included certain social issues within the text. Some readers can imply that this is a debate over the morality behind the death penalty, while others may think that it is a simple criminal story. That is the beauty behind a nonfiction novel: even though the book is composed entirely of facts, the audience can still form opinions because the author includes themes and literary pieces like a fictional