Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

In Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood, he creates a new genre, the "non-fiction novel," through his journalistic approach, and his novel makes clear his negative views on capital punishment. Capote's novel is a true story based on actual facts, so unlike a regular novel, it is not the product of the author's flight of fancy. It is not ordinary non-fiction either, however, which would have portrayed the murders in a clinical manner without any storyline. What Capote does is to incorporate the facts of the case into his novel as though he were writing a fictional story, even while adhering to the truth. The book reads like a fictional novel, yet it is factual throughout. Rather than describing Holcomb, Kansas as a small town on the prairie, Capote (5) uses richly textured descriptive phrases such as "the keening hysteria of coyotes" and "the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed" to provide the reader with a landscape of sights and sounds that place him there just as a novel would.

A salient point that Capote brings out in the story is that he finds capital punishment to be unfair. In a series of references to the practice throughout the book, Capote fleshes out his perspective on capital punishment from the point of view of different characters. He has "a tough, strutty little man" say that he believes in capital punishment as the Bible's "eye for an eye morality," for example, a tactic that disinclines the reader to sympathize with that viewpoint (Capo

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