Children and adults alike are exposed to bloody and violent media throughout their lives. Tom Wolfe, a journalist concerned with a form of writing that exploits violent crimes for the advantage of provoking curiosity in readers, writes in his article for men’s magazine Esquire “Porno-violence.”He believes that authors use morbid crimes for their own self gain by attracting people who otherwise would not read it. Wolfe believes that Truman Capote uses porno-violence to glorify the murders of the family to appeal to readers in his nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood. Capote utilizes the murders by Dick and Perry as a tool to gain interest from the readers and distorting the point of view the audience reads through to understand the killer’s motives.
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Using JFK’s assassination as an example, he says, “In the three and a half years since then, of course, there has been an incessant replay, with every recoverable clinical detail, of those less than five seconds in which a man got his head blown off” (Wolfe). Wolfe believes that people are innately curious about murder, and in JFK’s case, that curiosity leads them to watch the video of him being killed many times over. Capote uses the murder of the Clutter family to tap into the curiosity of human violence by describing the brutal killings, saying, “Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me- and these were his last words- wanted to know how his wife was… I thought he was a nice gentleman. Soft spoke, I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat” (Capote 244). Capote’s purpose of leaving the savage murders until the end is so that the audience will continue to read until they know what actually happened. Using these murders as a tool to gain reader’s interest he is harnessing Wolfe’s porno-violence and human’s growing interest in grim deaths to his advantage. Wolfe comments on Capote’s use of this by saying, “So read on, gentle readers, and on and on; you are led up to the moment before the crime on page 60—yet the specifics, what happened, the gory details, are kept out of sight, in grisly dangle, until page 244” (Wolfe). The specifics are held until close to the end of the book to …show more content…
Wolfe comments on the growing use of porno-violence throughout literature specifically in Capote’s novel. Capote uses porno-violence and utilizes the murders as a tool to gain interest from the readers, as well as distorting the point of view the audience reads through to understand the killer’s motives. Using this to engage the reader and maintain their curiosity throughout the book, he creates a morbidly violent environment for
Using JFK’s assassination as an example, he says, “In the three and a half years since then, of course, there has been an incessant replay, with every recoverable clinical detail, of those less than five seconds in which a man got his head blown off” (Wolfe). Wolfe believes that people are innately curious about murder, and in JFK’s case, that curiosity leads them to watch the video of him being killed many times over. Capote uses the murder of the Clutter family to tap into the curiosity of human violence by describing the brutal killings, saying, “Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me- and these were his last words- wanted to know how his wife was… I thought he was a nice gentleman. Soft spoke, I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat” (Capote 244). Capote’s purpose of leaving the savage murders until the end is so that the audience will continue to read until they know what actually happened. Using these murders as a tool to gain reader’s interest he is harnessing Wolfe’s porno-violence and human’s growing interest in grim deaths to his advantage. Wolfe comments on Capote’s use of this by saying, “So read on, gentle readers, and on and on; you are led up to the moment before the crime on page 60—yet the specifics, what happened, the gory details, are kept out of sight, in grisly dangle, until page 244” (Wolfe). The specifics are held until close to the end of the book to …show more content…
Wolfe comments on the growing use of porno-violence throughout literature specifically in Capote’s novel. Capote uses porno-violence and utilizes the murders as a tool to gain interest from the readers, as well as distorting the point of view the audience reads through to understand the killer’s motives. Using this to engage the reader and maintain their curiosity throughout the book, he creates a morbidly violent environment for