Covered with Dust: Truman Capote Essay

Truman Capote 's In Cold Blood is a stupendously written book, regularly acclaimed for it 's unparalleled style. As needs be, readers mustn 't look exceptionally far before they discover a surplus of rhetoric. Capote is regularly credited with having made the first crime novel, and he didn 't get this praise by composing such as others. He utilized his fascinating composition style to make his readers feel as if they were really in the book, rather than preserving the barrier between the reader and the page. He permitted them to get inside the character 's heads and truly know them, seeing flickers into the character 's pasts while, likewise, foretelling events to come. He wrote with a very, for the time, eccentric style, but also one that ended up being incredibly powerful.

Capote uses literary devices such as anaphora to describe the town Holcomb to give readers a comprehension on how Holcomb acted before the chaos began. In the beginning of the book Capote reports Holcomb town as, “Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, has never stopped there” (Capote 5). Life in Holcomb was as if the town had its own little world and nothing from the outside mattered. Holcomb was just a small, quiet town in the middle of nowhere. Capote wants people to know how separated Holcomb town was and how one big murder could matter so much.

In addition to including the most boring of details, Capote uses a great deal of imagery to describe the town and its residents. Focusing mostly on visual appeal, he describes the "sulphur-colored paint" and "flaking gold" to reveal the town's appearance and has-been status. Portraying the area as one that has seen better days, Capote writes about the "old stucco structure" that no longer holds dances, the crumbling post office, and the bank that now fails to serve its original purpose.” Combining visual imagery with hints of desolation, Capote attempts to reveal the gray and boring nature of the town through its appearance. He does not, however, rely only on visual details; in describing the local accent as "barbed with a prairie twang," he uses both auditory and visual appeal to make one imagine a ranch-hand's tone of voice and pattern of speech as he describes the events of his farming days. The "hard blue skies and desert-clear air" contribute to a feeling of emptiness, an emotional vacancy that seems omnipresent in the small town. Finally, even "the steep and swollen grain elevators" that represent the town's prosperity are seen in a solemn and mysterious light, as Capote makes certain to mention that the townspeople camouflage this abundance without explaining why they choose to do so.

He outlines this ideal by stating “Not that there is much to see--simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad” (3). While describing the town as a “congregation of buildings” he is able to make the town seem as unimportant as possible. The town was only seen as a bundle of buildings and nothing more to everybody who passed through. Capote wants the audience to see the town as nothing to establish how fine the line is between nothing and something. The audience is then able to see how important things that they see as “nothing” are and how these things are what can mean the

Throughout the novel, Capote appoints several narrative voices. For example, in the first paragraph within lines 1-12, Capote is speaking himself with the use of third person narration. During this paragraph, he describes the setting of the novel and uses imagery to portray its scenery. Within his description of Holcomb, Kansas, the town is perceived as quiet and lonesome, where nothing out of the ordinary occurs. In this section he speaks in a calm tone, creating a calm setting, which is ironic due to all of the chaos that arises in it. Another narrative voice, on page 66, is spoken by Alfred Stoecklein, a man who lived close to the Clutter family. Within this passage, he is talking about how terrifying it was to assimilate to the trauma that

The book In Cold Blood is a nonfiction book about the murder of the Clutter family. Taking place back in the 1959s, Truman Capote writes about the events leading up to the murders, when the murders took place, and the aftermath. He tells the story in such a descriptive manner, that it feels like we were there when it happened. The purpose of writing like that is so we can know everyone’s side of the story, even people you wouldn’t ordinarily think of. He helps us feel like we were there when it happened by effectively and efficiently using the rhetorical strategies. The rhetorical strategies I feel were most important to the story were pathos, logos, and the tone. The way Capote uses these rhetorical strategies and literary devices is

In Cold Blood is a masterpiece of storytelling and visual representations that come from Truman Capote’s use of delicate details to his lucid language and even his imaginative imagery. Everything from the gruesome horrors to the magnificent beauties, Capote carefully crafts his novel into more than just another mystery plot, but into a piece of figurative language work of art that we will continue to study for many more years to come. He more than exceeds the definition of what it means to be an author, a revolutionary, because he makes certain connections in this novel that include spiritual implications that connect with the reader empathetically. In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the author’s purpose in using imagery is to evoke emotions that he creates to connect on an empathetic level with the reader and to convey his abstract ideas about spirituality and the concept of life and death.

By all the accounts, Truman Capote was a mysterious man, being unhappy and self-absorbed even in some parties he over drink himself to death. In his masterpiece writing “In Cold Blood” he invented a new sort of writing, “the non-fiction” novel which was criticized on the basis of his emotional manipulation of a condemned murderer with whom he seems to fall in love. Capote is actually the dramatization of his famous writing “In Cold Blood” which covers the territory that the movie is based on the subject of Truman Capote’s attempt to somehow or other create the genre of non-fictional fiction. Capote illustrates a portrait of the interest of author in the two-cold blooded killers especially in the character of Perry Smith. (Brevet, 2009)

In the non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (1965) gives his own narrative of the Holcomb tragedy in which a family of four living out on a secluded farm were slaughtered with a shotgun by the collaboration of two individuals for a seemingly few dollars. In this novel, Capote gives a thorough character description of the two murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, as he recreates their experience (much as he sees it as it would be from

The section begins with a description of the town, “After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust to the direst mud”(Capote 1). By including these details in the description of the town it shows that the town is a very old fashioned town that is behind the societies that are in more developed, larger cities in America. Capote goes on, “The bank closed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have be converted into apartments”(Capote 2). With the bank having been closed around the time of the depression it shows that the town no longer trusted the government after the banks failed them and they do all their business between themselves. The town is a very closed off from the national system and the only connection they have is through their post office. All these descriptions cause the town to be a perfect picture of a safe, rural community where nothing bad happens and people all depend on each other.

As Capote states how the town is trivial to the state and its people it gives a sense that since the town is in the middle of nowhere it is cut off to the world around it. As well as creating the picture of the town being lonesome and the fact that other Kansans to think the town is in the middle of nowhere and nowhere near any other important towns in Kansas, Capote shows how peaceful the town was with no one around it to disrupt the peace or to cause any troubles for the town. By stating how far away the town was from everything else in the world the town gained a peaceful and innocent feel, that nothing could happen in the town without everyone knowing about it and the feel that everyone in the town knew and was connected to everyone else in some way.

Capote begins his novel with a conventional narrative structure choice: describing the setting. He spends several pages familiarizing the reader with the town of Holcomb, Kansas. This move is crucial, especially when contrasted with his unconventional choices for the traditional narrative timeline as the book progresses. As Capote introduces the reader to the Clutter family, with a particular focus on Herb, he sets the groundwork for the conflict. With necessary background information in mind, the reader first confronts the conflict with the words, “...he headed for home and the day’s work, unaware that it would be his last” (13). It is this moment, that the reader experiences the first sense of satisfaction. This is the

For the opening, Capote specifically chooses words with a negative connotation, allowing the readers to further understand what makes Holcomb unappealing. In the first line, he describes Holcomb as "lonesome" and "out there", by doing so he directly states that Holcomb is an insular city that is far away from any other city. When discussing Holcomb’s design, Capote uses the phrase “a haphazard hamlet” to describe the aimless

Nothing ever happens in a small town is a motto many own, especially in Holcomb, Kansas. Holcomb is the poster town for “Small Town” by John Cougar Mellencamp, a life that many midwesterners are immersed in.Truman Capote goes into very vivid details providing a beautiful image of the dull unassuming town that is Holcomb in the beginning of his novel In Cold Blood. Truman Capote brings depth and detail out of a rather bland appearance using stylistic elements such as diction, tone, and imagery.

Through his numerous short stories, fiction novels, and even nonfiction novels, Truman Capote has notably been considered one of America’s most prominent literary writers of the twentieth century. The numerous conflicts in which Capote dealt with in the earlier parts of his life led him to procure solace in writing (McMillan). Emerging as a prolific author who was commonly known for his excellent usage of prose, Capote came to publish the notorious nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, in 1966. During Capote’s era, Southern Gothicism, a literary genre associated with dark and grotesque themes, increasingly prevailed (Bjerre). Capote’s novel became an atypical work in the genre, though, as he transformed a work of literary nonfiction into what seemed as though a “factional” piece-- a true novel in which incorporated fictional elements of Southern Gothicism (“Slouching Toward Popularity). Within the novel, Capote intricately details the Clutter family murder executed by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. By doing so, he was able to successfully incorporate elements of Southern gothicism within the novel. Through the analysis of the damaged characters within the novel, the criminality involved in the Clutter murder, and the violence of the murder itself, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood not only fit the Southern Gothic genre, but ultimately came to revolutionize the nonfiction novel, thus proving its deserved standing in the literary canon.