Capote’s Historical Imagination

Capote’s In Cold Blood is regarded as the first example of what came to be known as the nonfiction novel. Capote’s interest was sparked by a short article he skimmed over in a newspaper. Six years later, and hundreds of hours spent researching the Clutter family murders, produced the novel In Cold Blood. Capote, with a near perfect mix of history and imagination, wrote a true crime novel that reads like a movie plays, and draws the audience further into the story while maintaining the integrity of the actual events.

First and foremost, Capote based his novel off of facts; facts that he spent countless hours collecting, analyzing and organizing. Capote talked to townspeople and authorities and read diaries and reports. In Cold Blood is grounded in truth and that is part of its huge appeal to the reader. Capote gave people a unique way to read about the murders other than in a newspaper clipping.

Capote had a dialogue between all the historical facts and his imagination. Capote saw all the creative possibilities, where others saw nothing. Before this novel, the distinction between history and narrative was a clear one. Capote formed a dynamic relationship between history and the way that he reconstructed those events, using literary devices, in the novel.

Capote fictionalizes certain parts to make the novel more successful in achieving what he set out to do. Conversations between the Clutter family are included, which no one could ever have known. Also, the final day of the Clutter’s life would have been unknown to Capote. By fictionalizing these details Capote adds a sense of normalcy and adds to his scene by scene cinematic style. Capote includes intimate details that are fictionalized, as in the case of Dewey and his wife’s private conversations. These add to character development and can be attributed to why the book reads more like a novel and less like journalism.

From the beginning of the novel Capote uses vivid detail to bring the town of Holcomb, and its people, to life. “Some seventy miles East of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West.” (Capote 2) The imagery that Capote includes about everything shows how he adds his own narration to the novel. Also the way in which Capote uses contrasting scenes, that quickly switch back and forth, add to an overall uneasy suspenseful feeling.

The style in which Capote wrote this novel does not have the reader searching for the traditional “Who did it” because he lays that out at the beginning. Instead they are waiting for the details of how and why they did. Through this story Capote adds character and personality to the killers and in a sense makes the reader empathetic to their situation, at least Perry’s. Capote’s

literary prowess is evident in the way he weaves fact and fiction into a form that reads like an amazing novel, but also has deep roots in fact and history. The novel In Cold Blood is an accurate account of the Clutter family murders, but the creative aspect that Capote added make the work more engaging than traditional historical recounts have been.