Nature Vs. Nurture In Truman Capote's Cold Blood

As a child Perry grew up with a limited education. When he is young and after his parent’s divorce Perry is living with his dad and is going to school. He finishes grade three but after that he never returns. Perry’s father moves from state to state throughout his childhood and prevents Perry from returning to school. Perry’s father wants Perry to stay with him instead of going to school so he can do work and take care of him. As Perry grows older however he understands that his father kept him out of school and Perry becomes extremely angry with him. Smith stated, “That bastard never gave me a chance. He wouldn’t let me go to school…. he didn’t want me to learn anything, only how to tote and carry for him. Dumb. Ignorant. That’s the way he wanted me to be. So that I could never escape him” (Capote 185). However, Perry is an intelligent and talented man with great potential. He has natural music ability, he likes to read and improve his vocabulary, and he also knows how to draw. In spite of this he never received encouragement from his father or anyone else: “Oh, the man I could have been! ... But the time came I begged to go to school. I happen to have a brilliant

Less complex of a character than Perry Smith, Dick Hickock undoubtedly deals with conflict in the latter part of his life that causes his mental state of mind to become impaired. Hickock, unlike Smith, endures a fair childhood. He is born into a “semi-poor” home, in which his parents rarely fight (Capote 277). Indeed, he respects his parents, and in turn, they prove loving toward him throughout his life. Involved in copious sports and attaining mostly A’s, his future seems bright. However, with no real money to pursue a college education, he turns toward the workforce. At his second job, he is involved in a car accident, which leads to the ruin of his mental state. Left for several hours unconscious, and with a “serious head injury,” he was not, as his father stated, “the same boy” (Capote 166, 294).

The dynamic partnership between Dick and Perry stems from their egos, or lack thereof. Perry is especially self-conscious, and his behavior as presented in the book is due to his sense of lacking and

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is considered one of the first novels to establish a new genre. Capote combined fictional elements to a real crime story that set the groundwork for future true crime novels. The foundation of the story is the tragic murder of the Clutter family, Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon, and the effect it had on small town of Holcomb, Kansas. In Cold Blood is a “journalistic novel” that has “the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry,". Throughout the novel, Capote switches between the perspective of the killers, the victims, and those who live in the town. This creates a unique and at times truly staggering parallel that ultimately forces the reader

Perry Smith and Dick Hickock were two very different men who came together in one the most renowned and talked about murders in American history. Although the men’s motives were the same, the psychological differences that they experienced after the murders were very different. Smith and Hickock were living testaments to the fact that one’s upbringing really does play a part into the person one will someday become. For Perry, his traumatic family experiences, or lack of them, led him to a psychotic malfunction and for

Perry Smith is a person that cannot tolerate frustration and stress levels the same way a normal human can. When he was at the Clutter’s house he dissociated himself from what he was doing. “I had to get down on my knees. And just like that I was outside myself.” (Capote 240) When Perry does this he can’t control what happens. This

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we are gathered here today not to assess whether these men, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, are guilty of their crimes; they have confessed and there is overwhelming evidence against them. No, today we are here to determine how they will pay for taking the lives of four innocent people, the Clutter family. My role here is to argue that these men should pay for their crimes with their lives. This is not merely a matter of opinion; this is what should be done according to the law of the great state of Kansas. Using evidence that the criminals themselves have provided, I shall prove to you that these men deserve to get the death penalty

Truman Capote writes a genius book about a real murder that happened and he tore the case apart to find out every detail that happened in the crime. In Cold Blood is about two men who almost get away with a hostile murder of a family. How a lead detective on the case gets so pressured about finding these men. It is also about the anxiety that these murders put on the killers because one of them is afraid they are going to get caught. The town that turns on each other and locks their doors at night and prays no one comes in. Capote’s purpose in this book was sympathizing with the killer and all the other people in the book, also in the book he presents foreshadowing, and Pathos, he has many other Rhetorical Strategies but these are the important Strategies.

1: What is the central argument the writer makes in your book? For example: “[Author name] argues that . . . because . . .”

The best novels are the ones that connects with the reader and just toys with their emotions, as if they too were also in the story by using pathos, the most powerful appeal. This holds true with Truman Capote’s, In Cold Blood and his writing appealing to the reader’s emotions in the portrayal of Perry Edward Smith and Richard “Dick” Eugene Hickock, the two murders with an addition of Capote showing a great deal of favoritism to Perry over Dick. Throughout the novel, Capote uses tone and diction to allure the reader into the novel’s world and into every character’s life, just as if we knew their whole backstory.

In the ongoing debate about whether nature or nurture is the primary force shaping a person’s character, Capote comes down firmly on the side of nurture and environment in his book In Cold Blood.

Hickock's childhood had no horror stories. His years of childhood showed no signs of abuse or neglect, but his parents were a little overprotective. He showed no real hatred for his parents or his childhood. Dick's commencement into adulthood revealed his abnormal "tendencies," (Capote 115) and proof is given by Hickock: "I think the main reason I went there [the Clutter home] was not to rob them but to rape the girl" (Capote 278).

The crimes committed by Perry are a direct result of the lack of nurture he received as a child. The lack of nurture stemmed from the divorce of his parents when he was young. After his parents divorce, Perry lived with his dad and tells his sister Barbara, “I was his nigger” (185). This further explains how he wasn’t treated as a kid and was essentially a slave to his father. The result of the divorce also affected his 3 siblings as they lived with his mother, who was a raging alcoholic.

In "Murder, He Wrote," William Swanson believes the stylistic techniques employed in Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood are more memorable than the story itself. For Swanson, Capote not only captures the readers' attention with a story about a horrific crime, but his use of diverse voices, sounds, and silences make it an event people will never forget.

Psychiatrists talk about criminals as people with stunted psychological development, people who have had pathological relationships with their parents, who lack adequate role models. There is a relatively new literature that talks about genes that may or may not dispose certain individuals to crime. On the popular side, there are endless numbers of books by conservatives talking about crime as a consequence of moral failure—of communities and schools and parents who no longer raise children with a respect for right and wrong. All of those theories are essentially ways of saying that the criminal is a personality type—a personality type distinguished by an insensitivity to the norms of normal society. People with stunted psychological development don’t understand how to conduct healthy relationships. People with genetic predispositions to violence fly off the handle when normal people keep their cool. People who aren’t taught right from wrong are oblivious to what is and what is not appropriate behavior. People who grow up poor, fatherless, and buffeted by racism don’t have the same commitment to social norms as those from healthy middle-class homes. Bernie Goetz and those four thugs on the subway were, in this sense,