Through the use of carefully chosen epigraph, organization, non-authoritative presence, embellishment, 'researching the character's background and pathos, Truman Capote is able to tell Dick's story. Hickock and Perry Smith in great detail while also presenting his argument against capital punishment in his masterpiece In Cold Blood.Say No to Plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Before the book begins, Capote sets the tone with a verse from François Villon's “Ballad of the Hanged,” which he composed while he was on death row. in 1463. Capote preserved the excerpt in its original French version, but when translated it reads: "Men, my brothers who live after us, / do not have your hearts hardened against us. / For if you have pity on us poor people, / God will sooner have mercy on you. This poem very subtly foreshadows Capote's intentions to write a book about the killers and their point of view, as well as to attempt to make the reader feel sorry for them. The poem also references religion, which plays a very important role in the story with the Clutters and especially Perry. Villon's story also bears a surprising number of similarities to Dick and Perry's crime spree; he murdered a priest, robbed a safe just before a gang crime spree, then was arrested for affray and sentenced to death. Interestingly, his sentence was changed to a 10-year ban from Paris. Capote uses this epigraph to give readers a glimpse of what awaits them without revealing any details about what is happening. This is an appropriate reference because Villon and the Clutter Killers committed somewhat similar crimes but had two very different outcomes. Organization is a very important aspect of In Cold Blood. Part one focuses on Dick and Perry's future victims, the Clutter family, but part two skips the murders and recounts the events that followed. The details of how the murders took place are covered later in the book. Like everything in Capote's finely crafted masterpiece, this was intentional and done for a specific reason. Smith and Hickock's journey after their "score" is described before the gruesome details of the murder. This allows Capote to flesh out Dick and Perry as human beings without the reader's opinion being tainted by knowledge of their appalling actions. It also establishes the Clutters as a personification of the American dream and gives details about the family that will allow the reader to better understand events later in the book. In Cold Blood is considered the beginning of a new genre, creative nonfiction. By combining real events with his literary technique, Capote controls how the reader perceives events and characters, which he uses to his advantage to portray Dick and Perry as complex human beings rather than simple criminals. Each element of the narrative was chosen for inclusion by Capote based on their effectiveness in convincing the reader to agree with him, but this is done without an authoritative position. For example, he mentions the doctor crying while Andrews' “heart continued to beat for nineteen minutes” (383). Very faint indications of the inhumanity of the death penalty are scattered throughout, but Capote does not explicitly express his personal opinion on the matter and presents the information so that the reader can draw their own conclusions. This lack of dominant presence reinforces the philosophy ofCapote as having a fair outside perspective, as well as not shying away from the details of Dick and Perry's horrific actions to keep his opinion impartial and admit that they were far from innocent. His lack of presence is particularly notable in “the journalist, who knew Smith as well as Hickock” (386). It's easy for this detail to go unnoticed, but the reporter is actually Capote himself taking the thousands of pages of notes he prepared for the book. They are not mentioned in the book, but his extensive note-taking and time spent interviewing inmates certainly also establishes his ethos as an extremely knowledgeable source. Creative nonfiction can create disputes over the validity of the events it presents, and In Cold Blood is no exception. Many witnesses to the hanging claim that Capote's account of Perry's apology was embellished for dramatic effect. Choosing to exaggerate Perry's final words would fit the sensitive man Capote portrayed Perry as earlier in the book. However, someone who says, "I didn't mean to hurt that man." I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so until the moment I cut his throat” (281), when they talk about a murder he committed, they don’t seem to have much remorse. If Capote were indeed embellishing Perry's apology, it would be to prove that no matter what horrible things someone does, there is still some humanity left in them and perhaps rehabilitation would be better than the death penalty. a central theme of a book about the brutal murders of an innocent family, but its significance is obvious once the characters' backstories are established. Besides the Clutter family obviously playing an important role, Dick and Perry's families from childhood have received a lot of attention. Dick's parents are a lot like the Clutters; both were simple farmers who treated their children well, the main difference between the families being the considerable gap in wealth. Perry, on the other hand, had a horrible childhood, which appealed heavily to pathos. His parents had a messy separation, his siblings committed suicide, his education ended after third grade, and he was treated horribly by almost every adult in his childhood, leaving him without a role model. Nuns beat him for wetting the bed, and Perry describes what a worker at a Salvation Army children's shelter did to him: "She was filling a bathtub with ice water, put it in and held me under it until I turned blue. Almost drowned” (152). His tragic upbringing could certainly force readers to show a little more empathy towards him and understand his mental instability. Dick's background makes the reader wonder how he ended up in the same position as someone with a past as difficult as Perry's, but Capote points out that Dick was never punished for his wrongdoing when he was a child. While one case was much more extreme than the other, the way they were raised affected Dick and Perry's psyches. Dick and Perry's case caused controversy, and Capote shows that it could be seen as very unfair to the defendants. Although it ultimately did not affect the outcome of the trial, Capote highlighted Dick's efforts to argue the inadequacy of their defense. Among those who thought the trial was unfair was Dick's father, who said, "The judge up there!" I have never seen a man with so much prejudice. It makes no sense to go to trial. Not with him in charge”..