The Writer's Duty In In Cold Blood By Truman Capote

What is the duty of a writer, one might wonder? Why do they write, and what must they include in it? According to William Faulkner, during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the “writer’s duty” is to write with emotion and to cause a reaction with people. In the nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, the author, fulfills his “writer’s duty” by switching the perspectives of characters and building strong character descriptions. As Capote tells the story of the gruesome murder of the Clutter family, his perspective changes between the killers, the lead detective in the case, and friends of the murdered family keeping the reader in uncertainty of how to feel. After the murder, Susan Kidwell, the late Nancy Clutter’s best friend, went in the funeral home and …show more content…
“There was this one nurse, she used to call me ‘nigger’ and say there wasn’t any difference between niggers and Indian… What she used to do, she’d fill a tub with ice-cold water and put me in it, and hold me under till I was blue (132).” In this moment, the reader most likely feels sorry for Perry. No child should have to suffer through the hardships that he went through. It is easy to see the trauma of his childhood has had an everlasting effect on Perry, so the reader isn’t so quick to judge and hate him anymore, even with his terrible actions. He obviously had something wrong mentally because of those problems and so much more. The audience doesn’t really blame Perry after reading about his pain. This change in emotion leaves the reader in turmoil on how to feel. Capote changing the perspectives allows the people to see the situation from several different points which causes the confusion of reactions felt. Capote strongly disapproved of the death penalty which the two killers of the Clutters were sentenced to. To get people to see the horrors behind it, he switched the perspectives between all the point of views that he