Covered with Dust: Truman Capote Essay

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

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.

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.

The town of Holcomb, Kansas is very stale and damaged throughout the book Capote characterizes his view of Holcomb by using rhetorical devices such as imagery, diction, repetition, foreshadowing, and selection of detail to give us a glimpse of his perspective of Holcomb from the beginning of the book until the end.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Normally in nonfiction works, the author knows only what he or she discovers while researching, limited to only the raw facts; Capote, on the other hand, appears all knowing of his characters’ inner feelings,

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.

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

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)

Throughout In Cold Blood, Truman Capote writes on the events directly before, during, and the happenings after the brutal murdering of the Clutter family in the quaint town of Holcomb, Kansas. The actions Dick Hickock and Perry Smith attracted Capote and led him to ultimately report on the entire ordeal. Throughout Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, Hickock and Smith’s deranged and psychotic actions directly correlate to a deep psychosis they both suffered for multiple years.

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