The Structure of In Cold Blood, Study notes of Forensics

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The Structure of

In Cold Blood

A True Account of a Multiple

Murder and Its Consequences

Sub-title significance “A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences” How does this title determine what the novel’s focus will be?

Epigraph Freres humains qui apres nous vives, N’ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis, Car, se pitie de nouse povres avez, Dieu en aura plus tost de cous mercis.

• Francois Villon Ballade des pendus Human brothers who live after us, Do not have (your) hearts hardened against us, For, if you take pity on us poor (fellows), God will sooner have mercy on you. - Ballade of the hanged

Epigraph What is Capote evoking by having this as his epigraph? Why doesn’t he translate it? Why reference a 15 th century song? What attitude does he want readers to have as they start reading his novel? Human brothers who live after us, Do not have (your) hearts hardened against us, For, if you take pity on us poor (fellows), God will sooner have mercy on you.

- Ballade of the hanged

“The Last to See Them Alive” Take an educated guess; what will the first part (74 pages) consist of? Why does Capote title the sections?

What does he emphasize on page one?

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat

plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other

Kansans call ‘out there’” (Capote 3).

Where will this story take place?

What is the setting’s defining feature?

Why does he start with the place, rather than the

murder?

Stasis broken – the novel “begins” “Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans- in fact, few Kansans- had ever heard of Holcomb… At that time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them- four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives” (Capote 5). How is Capote using juxtaposition? What is he trying to contrast? Make an inference: how do four gun shots end six lives? What is being foreshadowed? How would this be different for his readers who already were familiar with the story from the newspapers?

Things to look out for while reading/annotating… As you read In Cold Blood (and annotate for ethos, pathos, logos), consider why Capote is writing the novel in this specific way. Consider his authorial choices:

what is he trying to emphasize?

why does he feel these details are necessary?

why does he spend so much time on this single day in

mid-November? (excruciating in its attendtion to

details)

The absence of the author “My feeling is that for the nonfiction-novel form to be entirely successful, the author should not appear in the work. Ideally. Once the narrator does appear, he has to appear throughout, all the way down the line, and the I-I-I intrudes when it really shouldn't. I think the single most difficult thing in my book, technically, was to write it without ever appearing myself, and yet, at the same time, create total credibility .” How might this perspective influence the novel? Consider both what will be included, and what will be left out.

Writing In Cold Blood “In 1959, Truman Capote stumbled on a short article in The New York Times about a gruesome quadruple murder at a Kansas farm. He soon realized that it was the story he had been waiting to write for 20 years. When he began writing professionally, Capote, who died 32 years ago today, theorized that journalism and creative writing could come together in the form of what he called the ‘nonfiction novel.’ The subject had to be right, however; with journalism underpinning such a novel, the pitfall was that it could quickly date itself. Crime, he decided, could be the perfect vehicle. ‘The human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time,’ he told George Plimpton in a 1966 interview in The New York Times.”