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 (Capote 248). Then he counters the man's opinion with "most of the ministers are opposed to capital punishment, say it's immoral, unchristian" (Capote 266). The character Harrison Smith declares capital punishment to be "a relic of human barbarism" (Capote 303), and Reverend Post points out that "Capital punishment is no answer: it doesn't give the sinner time enough to come to God" (Capote 306). Smith speaks for Capote when he explains that "any man who could paint t<...