In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
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Character Analysis: Mrs Bonnie Clutter
Although all of the Clutter deaths are incredibly tragic, there is something especially poignant about the death of Bonnie Clutter, a woman struggling to live with many regrets, and afflicted by terrible postnatal depression that has accumulated into a chronic despondency and convalescence. She once had dreams of pursing a career in nursing (a path that her second eldest daughter Beverly would go on to fulfil, perhaps one of the few hopeful elements of the novel!) and she bitterly laments that she did not see this through “just to prove... that [she] once succeeded at something.” This revelation also implies she does not consider her flourishing family a ‘success’ she has achieved, for she fears they “don’t need [her].” These feelings of inadequacy create a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby Bonnie retreats from her own life, with Nancy (perhaps unconsciously) filling the void by learning to prepare family meals and compensate for her mother’s absence.
To her credit though, Bonnie is a good judge of character: in the short time she is exposed to the cruelty of Dick and Perry, she deduces that Dick is the more outwardly brutal and sadistic, and that he may harbour vicious intentions towards Nancy, whereas she views Perry as a more reliable man, making him promise not to let Dick harm her daughter. Though she may be wrong to consider Perry trustworthy, he does fulfil his promise to her, and it is likely that Bonnie’s insights and pleas were what prevented Nancy from enduring more pain and trauma before her death.
After one of many stays at a psychiatric facility, Bonnie learns that her psycho- logical anguish may be the result of a pinched nerve in her spine, but in yet another tragedy, we will never know if that was truly the case. In some sense, Bonnie’s sense of unfulfilment persists after her death as Capote explores the consequences of the murders, and the senselessness behind them.
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In Cold Blood
Sample Essay
In Cold Blood is the story of an apparently motiveless murder of an innocent family, and the ramifications for the town and people involved. The full title of the text is In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, which hints at Capote’s dual focus on both the crime and its reverberations. But it is also a text that combines the credibility of a real story, the freedom of a documentary, the allure of a film, and the precision of poetry. This synthesis of genres and styles is something we will examine throughout this Text Guide, and is always worth keeping in mind when we talk about the narrative itself.
The Clutter family – Mr Herb Clutter and Mrs Bonnie Clutter, and their two youngest children Nancy and Kenyon – were brutally killed in their Kansas farm home on Sunday 15 November, 1959. The murderers were Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, two ex-convicts out on parole for petty theft who had heard rumours in prison that Mr Clutter kept $10,000 in a safe in his home, though this turns out to be false information. The two men plan to carry out a robbery, but leave having shot four innocent people.
From here, the book makes temporal shifts between the town of Holcomb where the Clutters lived and where the townsfolk struggle to accept and understand the violent and seemingly random attack in their community, and the stories of Dick and Perry who flee the state but are later apprehended by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, led by investigator Alvin Dewey who was a friend of the Clutter family.
Over the course of Dick and Perry’s interactions, we learn more about their lives and the various tragedies and accidents that have befallen them, leaving them fractured and damaged both physically and psychologically. In the end, they are sentenced to death and held on Death Row in a Kansas prison for years before they are executed on April 14th, 1965.
The text opens with the introduction to and immediate murder of the Clutters, and ends with the execution by hanging of Perry and Dick. Hence, the story is bookended by death, but also concerns itself with what caused these events and what happens as a consequence. In this sense, this is almost like a mystery novel: we know that Perry and Dick were killed because they murdered the Clutters, but why were the Clutters murdered? This is the central premise that Capote seeks to unravel.
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