Truman Capote's Failure Essay

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor" (BrainyQuote.) The great deal of hardships in my life led me to be successful. I dealt with abandonment for much of my life. I failed at many thing in my life but writing was not one of them. I became famous after I failed many times. I am one of the most famous and controversial figures in contemporary American literature (DIScovering authors.) My non-fiction books, journals, and characters were greatly influenced by my lack of love as a child.

Success is boring and doesn’t prepare you for the next time. Failure on the other hand prepares you and forces you to learn from your mistakes. Trying to make the natural order different doesn’t help and making you destroy that can and might jeopardize the fact that if you are successful or not in the future.

When I look at the word failure I didn’t see success. But that slowly changed as I read the book What the Best College Students Do by Ken Bain Chapter four. Bain, for me and I’m sure many other, have changed our view point on failure being a bad thing. He instead expressed failure as an “opportunity to learn something.” (121) As infants we grow and develop, we learn to walk by falling down a couple hundred times, and we learn to speak by babbling. By trying to walk, and trying to talk, we may fail at first. As an infant, you cannot give up when you are face to face with failure. You must get up and try again to learn. In the book, What the Best College Students Do by Ken Bain he uses people’s experiences and research to explain why failure is an opportunity to learn something new, rather than seeing failure as something bad. He asserts “people who become highly creative and productive learn to acknowledge failures, even to embrace them, and to explore and learn from them.” (100) Failure is important. If we did not get up and try again as infants, we would not be where we are today.

Failure is something that all people encounter in their lives. In some situations failure can break a person or make a person, meaning a person can fail at something and just simply give up. Others will fail and that failure can give them the inspiration to try harder to one day achieve their goal. I'm the type of person to fail and work harder until I am content. As my championship baseball coach would say "What’s our motto? Never give up!"

Failure can be a very difficult thing to cope with. It can be something that makes you or breaks you. I have learned that failure is what defines a person; it shows your motivation to bounce back when things get rough. I have learned from my failure instead of dwelling on it and making myself weaker.

The second point of view comes from Perry, the criminal that readers connect with and support throughout the novel. This passage also starts with quote, “Mountains. Hawks wheeling in a white sky” (pg. 110). The specific quote begins both Dick and Perry’s point of view in order to illustrate the same mental image in the reader’s mind, and also exemplifies the use of juxtaposition. As the passage continued the narrator discusses Perry’s emotions when thinking about the murder:

21. Why does the landlady expect Perry to turn up again anytime? Pg 177 She expects him to come back anytime because he asked her to keep it for him until he came back and got it.

Capote wrote about real people and those real people have to live with the backlash that Capote’s work brewed up through its years of fame. The Clutters, their friends, the agents, and even the murderers were all real people with real feelings, not a character in a book. In a true fiction, a writer can twist and mold their characters into whoever they like. They can make things up about them without consequences because they aren’t real. However, Capote didn’t write a fiction novel; he wrote a “nonfiction” novel. Characters that he wrongly portrayed left a lasting scar on the memory of the real person. The two surviving daughters of Herd and Bonnie Clutter were furious with the portrayal of their mother as an invalid and Rev. James Post told

Capote wrote about real people and those real people have to live with the backlash that Capote’s work brewed up through its years of fame. The Clutters, their friends, the agents, and even the murderers were all real people

A family of four murdered to death; slaughtered, a Renowned writer Truman Capote wanted to study this murder and write a book about it. Capote tends to use a lot of imagery conveying the town, “Holcomb, Kansas” which the family of four were massacred in. Vivid description was not the only thing that capote utilized, there were many more rhetorical devices as well. Starting off Capote views the town as lonely, not much to it, not really being an attractive town. The Clutter family murder was essentially the only thing that caused attention to the town.

“Miriam” by Truman Capote states “For the only thing she had lost to Miriam was her identity…” Beforehand as Mrs. Miller lived life before meeting Miriam she was a widow at a young age. She lived alone with only the company of her canary, had no friends, and did not venture out much. Her life could be seen as simple maybe even boring. She had an acceptable grasp on life maintaining daily chores on her own. I know this because in the text it states (Capote 1), “Her activities were seldom spontaneous: she kept the two rooms immaculate, smoked an occasional cigarette, prepared her own meals, and tended a canary.”

Winning gives you an incomparable feeling of joy and accomplishment; it is one of the best feelings in the world (Winning Isn't Everything, It's the Only Thing). “Winning does build confidence especially when that winning represents a true accomplishment; (i.e., I've beaten a worthy opponent),” says David A. Feigley (The Role of Winning in Youth Sports).

Failure is something that we cannot go through life without experiencing. The best thing about failure is that failure can be used as a great learning experience to improve upon things in our lives and career. Using failure as a learning tool is dependent upon the person and how they view it as well as how they use it. Failure is a matter of perspective and the lessons in failure are important aspects towards growth and development. If we did not experience failure there wouldn’t be opportunities for learning. Failure can teach us about ourselves as well as provide an understanding for our

It is often assumed that failure is a deterrent to achievement. Rather, failure should be seen as a motivator for a person to keep trying until the objective or aim of a particular mission is fulfilled.

Traditionally, failure is seen as a negative concept and is defined as lacking success. I, on the other hand, try to put a positive spin on everything in life. I see failure as an obstacle that is experienced by all, but it does not define an individual. Failure in essence will force an individual to be more receptive to their surroundings and actions and also will force an individual to mature. Looking back on my childhood years I can now pinpoint the areas where I failed and I can confidently say that I have grown and prospered due to those failures. The three major failures I have experienced were my attention deficit issues which affected my ability to succeed in school, my anti-social habit that I let consume my early years, and my