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  • Essay / Capote's New Literary Form in "In Cold Blood"

    In the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of the nuclear family was a personification of the American dream, the illusion of the perfect life, the perfect wife and perfect children, all living in a model community. With four staccato shotgun blasts, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood almost irreversibly shatters this quintessential family mold, sending him on a journey of bewilderment, sympathy, and greed for which Dick and Perry were responsible. For many, however, their ideas about the "perfect score", the manhunt and the trial that followed were tainted by the filthy hands of the puppeteers and the author's personal biases. Every action in the story was manipulated for its true endgame, to create a tantalizing atmosphere from a macabre act. For all his realistic recreation of dialogue and alternating arcs to slowly interweave the two plots, Capote is hesitant to ultimately create the fictional, realistic atmosphere of the book, a consequence of his inability to separate the intimate aspects of his writing. from the established facts of the events that occurred. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The “non-fiction novel” that Capote introduces into the literary canon successfully creates a multi-layered plot that effectively evokes the both conflicting feelings for the antagonists as well as creating a realistic atmosphere that reflects the real events of the murder while subtly adding enough elements to include a fictional aspect to it. The book itself is divided into 5 different sections, each part of the two divergent story threads that contribute to the mythos of the story through the following of Dick and Perry and law enforcement in Garden City, developing two distinct layers of what will ultimately become a single plot. As a result, Capote is able to treat each plot as its own multi-faceted, self-contained entity before merging them together, and by keeping them separate, he fleshes out each character's development, effortlessly combining real and invented elements. truly portraying the person he wants her to be, not who she was. To many impressed, including the New York Times, "[Capote] demonstrated that reality, if heard patiently, can orchestrate its full range" (Knickerbocker 4). This "full range" is illustrated by the contradictory emotions that Dick and Perry evoke, sometimes compassion, sometimes anger, all feelings which distort the book's perception of them and offer different perspectives on how they could be performed long after their executions. In doing so, Capote emphasizes that although his characters are partly his own creation, they are nevertheless essentially the product of their own actions, fixed in reality. Unfortunately, Capote's often fabricated dialogue, designed to speed up the pace of the story, ends up hurting. becoming a difficult aspect to overcome in terms of its relevance to the descriptive diction of the book and the absurdity of the author's supposed memorization of every word. As a “343-page true-crime chronicle” (Kauffmann 1), Capote insisted that the story be as realistic as possible, a decision that was as ill-advised as it was poorly executed. Because the story is systematically rooted in the interactions between its characters, dialogue is used extensively to fill in plot gaps that the author's descriptions could not fill in on their own. Although Capote wanted to add a certain degree of authenticity to the novel, the words of.