Was anyone else creeped out? My heart was beating the entire time while I was reading the scene-of-the-crime section. The girls went into the house looking for their friend Nancy. Even they knew at that instant that something was horribly wrong because they could hear their footsteps and every sound they were making as they approached Nancy’s bedroom. Nancy’s father, Mr. Ewalt, also felt uneasy. Then the first police officer arrived and went inside the house with Ewalt and the English teacher and together they investigated the scene—it was chilling. I was as disturbed as they were.
I thought it was amazing how the author could give such detail as if he personally knew the Clutter family and their killers. He just seemed to be ever present, like an invisible witness. On page thirty he says, “Now, on this final day of her life, Mrs. Clutter hung in the closet the calico housedress she had been wearing, and put on one of her trailing nightgowns and a fresh set of white socks. Then, before retiring, she exchanged her ordinary glasses for a pair of reading spectacles. Though she subscribed to several periodicals, none of these rested on the bedside table—only a Bible. A bookmark lay between its pages, a stiff piece of watered silk upon which an admonition had been embroidered: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.”
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3 comments:
The interesting question is this: how much of this is he making up? As we talked about yesterday, Capote did a crapload of research for this, but at the same time, I think some of the stuff the he says is unknowable--the Clutters' movements in the house when they were alone, for instance. But then, I think for those sorts of things I think he gains a lot by presenting a particular narrative that is as likely true as not--that by learning about their personalities, the things they generally did, he was able to apply that in the specific in a way that makes the story much more compelling. I wonder, though, if he would have done the same thing if he were writing today--in a post-James Frey world.
Yes, I agree with Josh's comment. I think there is blurry line when it comes to Creative non-fiction it should be fiction/creative non-fiction because we do not or will never know how much of the story is fiction. There is definately no way that he could know the small details like what the kids said or what they were actually doing. It is amazing to read but to believe it is the truth is a little far fetch I think.
Yeah, it was eerie....because while reading through the story. Everything was really not just quiet like when someone is not home and your knocking on the door. It was silent, no noise, and you knew something bad has happened. Or you just knew something was wrong. That silence reminded me of about a year or two years ago. One of the little baby birds had fallen from the top of our house and so we had it in a little shoe box. But one day I woke up and I felt silence. But it wasn't an eerie silence it was a peaceful silence. I looked inside the box and the little birdie had died:(
But back to: In Cold Blood. That wasn't a good silence. It was a bad silence. Something horrible happened in that house. It's just sad and horrible and graphic that these people were just murdered in a blink of an eye. Yet the person who killed them. Was a person who was already messed up himself.
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