Structure

Mike Young

Mrs. Robinson

AP English

7/31/07

Capote’s ability to consistently build suspense throughout the novel is one of the strongest contributing factors to In Cold Blood’s very unique style and shows Capote’s amazing literary abilities. Capote demonstrates several strategies to keep the reader in a sea of suspense. He uses montage throughout the first section of the book, and structures the “chapters” so as to heighten the suspense and create rising action.

Capote switches between scenes of Dick and Perry and the Clutter family countless times throughout the first few sections of the book, creating montage. This gives the reader a distinct movie-like feeling, where supense is created by quickly flipping between scenes that are occurring simultaneously.

Capote uses dramatic irony as well to heighten supense. Statements such as “…He headed for home and the days work, unaware that it would be his last”(13) allow the reader to safely assume that the Clutters will be murdered. But as it is with dramatic irony, the fact that the reader knows something that the charactersdon’t increases tension in the reader’s mind.

The unique structure that Capote uses adds much to the story that a more traditional structure would fail to capture. He doesn’t reveal the actual murder scene until nearly the end, when Dick and Perry confess while being questioned by police.This is perhaps the greatest cause of suspense throughout the book. Although the reader knows that Dick and Perry are the murderers from the beginning, Capote strategically depicts the actual details of the murder over halfway through the novel. Capote used this particular plot structure for several reasons. First, the way he organized all the events was done just so as to bring the reader into a novel bursting at the seams with suspense. Second, if Capote had used a traditional structure, describing every event as it happened from start to finishing throughout the novel, the result would have been a very bland and unoriginal book. It is fairly obvious that Capote was trying to achieve the extreme opposite of the typical murder mystery. Most importantly, and quite simply, In Cold Blood couldn’t have been better any other way.

Francois Villon

Mike Young

Mrs. Robinson

AP English

7/30/07

Before I had even finished the second paragraph of his Wikipedia biography, it was blatantly obvious. Anyone who takes the time to look up Francois Villon, or even just takes the initiative to interpret these four humble lines that seem as though they were carelessly dropped and forgotten about would quickly discover that they are much more. Both the poem and the author have incredible relevance to Capote’s novel.

Also known as Francois de Montcorbier and Francois de Loge, Villon was born in 1431, most likely in Paris, though his birth place is not known for sure. Villon lived a life very similar to that of Perry and Dick. He was a thief, a vagabond, and a well known poet, and spent time in jail for killing a man.

While in jail, Villon wrote Testaments, his most famous book of poetry, and the Ballade Des Pendus, or Ballad of the Hanged which opens with the four lines Capote featured in his novel. Capote used these lines from Villon’s poem for several reasons. Villon’s lifestyle shares a lot of similarities with that of Perry and Dick. More importantly, the four lines Capote uses are told from hanged men who are addressing those who have outlived them. They are saying that if we have pity, rather than become insensitive towards them, God will in turn be kinder to us. Capote was indirectly adding more to the story by including these lines.

Translation 1:

Oh brother men who live, though we are gone,

let not your hearts be hardened at the view,

for if you pity us you gaze upon,

God is more likely to show you mercy too.

Translation 2:

Mortal brothers who after us live on

Be not hardened when our fate is known

But pity us our ills when we are gone

And likewise God will pity you your own

I prefer the first translation of Ballade Des Pendus. Whereas the second translation is more straight foreword, the first translation allows the reader to make a more personal interpretation. The reader can find what they want in the first translation, but it is still able to be applied to In Cold Blood.

Nurture Reigns Supreme

Mike Young

Mrs. Robinson

AP English

7/30/07

“Young! Don’t play dumb with me!”

I felt a bead of sweat roll down my forehead, not from fear of the 5’6 goateed man with a shiny, hairless scalp that surely tingled with the pleasure of knowing he was minutes away from sentencing me to another day of in-school-suspension, but from the jumping jacks I had been doing for the last five minutes. Every person occupying the gym (roughly ninety 14- and 15-year old students, three PE teachers, two gossiping math teachers, and a severely obese resource officer) abruptly stopped what they were doing and turned to watch the showdown that was destined to occur.

His words hit me like seven arrows carefully chosen to shatter my confidence before they even left his waxy red lips.

“Young, don’t make me say it again.”

Little did he know, that particular day my confidence was made of brick.

There was nothing innate about me convincing four of my friends (quite easily) to unzip their pants and walk into PE that day in eighth grade. No natural urges were subconsciously telling me to stare blankly at my PE “teacher” as he commanded me to close my boastingly open fly.

And there was certainly nothing written in my genetic code urging me to continue to ignore the fact that my fly was down as I was led to the principals office.

In exactly the same way, there were no innate qualities telling Perry or Dick to kill the Clutters. Perry says so himself in his confession: “I told Dick to count me out… He’d have to do it alone. He started the car. We were leaving, and i thought, Bless Jesus. I’ve always trusted my intuitions; they’ve saved my life more than once.”(235) Here, Perry says that his intuition told him to bail out. Intuitions are natural tendencies; therefore, naturally, Perry decided it was the wrong choice to follow through with the original plan.

But then something goes wrong. Suddenly, nurture (and a bottle of liquor) get in the way of Perry’s innate knowledge. It was in no way nature that drove Perry and Dick to commit those murders. Nature was actually urging them to turn around, to abandon their “sure-fire cinch.”(233)

When talking about the extreme measures he went through to get a measly silver dollar, Perry said, “It made me sick. I was just disgusted… Here i am crawling on my belly to steal a child’s silver dollar.”(240) Perry’s natural innate qualities would never tell him to do such a pathetic thing, and he knows it. Nurture was purely what caused him to chase so obsessively after a dollar.

Synonymously, nurture drove me and four others to start the Ziplow Club that day, three and a half years ago. Out of our own previous experiences and encounters did we come to the conclusion that making such a grotesque statement would one day become a good story. So what does all this mean? Quite simply, nurture is the greater deciding factor when considering humans behavioral patterns.

Hello world!

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.