Personal Response, Part One

To be honest, the section that I’ve read so far has just been depressing. The only characters that I really liked and rooted for were brutally murdered by two mentally insane men. I know it isn’t the author’s fault, because these events really did happen. Capote is clearly a talented writer. The fact that the information portrayed in this book was discovered by interviewing the people involved makes the author a kind of omniscient character, who is able to look into the minds of the characters and give an accurate representation of what they must have been thinking at the time. His use of rhetorical elements is incredible, considering the subject matter. Another thing he does extremely well is that he finds ways to make the readers like or dislike certain characters. For example, Perry is a murderer. At any point in time, he could have simply walked out on Dick or tried to dissuade him from going through with it. But he didn’t. Perry was just as responsible for those murders as his partner was, so why does the audience feel nothing but disgust towards Dick, but sympathy towards Perry? It’s because the author has total control over what the audience knows about each character. We weren’t there. We didn’t know these people. For all we know, the Clutters could have been a snobby, self-centered, supercilious family that Capote altered to change the way we feel about their deaths. This could also be the case with their murderers. He might have changed Perry from a heartless killer, like Dick, to a character with feelings and dreams that the audience doesn’t want to see die. But anyways, with regards to the writing, I think shifting the perspective back and forth is a clever way to tell the story, but to be perfectly honest, this first section doesn’t “open any doors” for me.