In the first chapter, Capote juxtaposes the Clutter family and the killers. In the first paragraphs of the novel it becomes clear that the Clutter family is situated in the conservative suburb town of Holcomb. The town is, “within the Bible Belt borders, and therefore a person’s church affiliation is the most important factor influencing his class status” (34). The Cutter family is highly religious, maintaining a proper distinction of gender roles and a strong reverence for family. So much so, Capote tells us that Nancy’s boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, is a Roman Catholic, “a fact that should in itself be sufficient to terminate whatever fancies she and this boy might have of some day marrying” (8). One is reluctant to draw so exemplary a citizen, a successful teetotaling Republican devout farmer, into the circle of self-alienated Americans. Yet manifestly this was a man without connection with his inner self, living by forced intention, by conscious design, programmatically, rather than by any happy disposition of natural impulse.

Here Herbert Clutter, 48, and his wife, Bonnie, 45, lived in Holcomb, a suburb of the county seat of Finney County, Garden City, “in the middle—almost the exact middle—of the continental United States” (33). Both native Kansans, they had four children; nancy, 16, and Kenyon, 15, still lived at home on the family’s River Valley Farm. it consisted of the house, three barns, more than eight hundred acres and three thousand more rented acres. Eveanna Jarchow, their eldest, lived in illinois with her husband and son. Beverly, the next, was studying to be a nurse in Kansas City. e family prospered from hard work and skill. ey were respected. e Eisenhower administration appointed Herbert Clutter to the Federal Farm Credit Board. ey were faithfully Methodist. Evidence of the seriousness of religious association in the area was that nancy’s boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, was a Roman Catholic, “a fact that should in itself be su cient to terminate whatever fancies she and this boy might have of some day marrying” (8).

“as Mr. Clutter often remarked, "an inch more of rain and this country would be paradise - Eden on earth." The little collection of fruit-bearers growing by the river was his attempt to contrive, rain or no, a patch of the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden, he envisioned.”

“ ‘take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is’” (30);Nancy laid out her clothes for church the coming Sunday morning; “it was the

dress in which she was to be buried” (56).

This is an act of senseless violence, a murder that shakes the very foundation of Holcomb. How could the Clutters, people beyond reproach, be brutally murdered? The rest of the novel leaves us asking why? We are trying to make sense? What is justice

Now comes the time to analyze the Characters.

Perry joined gangs and was sent to various detention homes, Christian-a liated and not. The physical, emotional, and racial abuse he received in such places instilled in

him an emphatic atheism he would hold to for the rest of his life. Over the years his mother became a sexually promiscuous alcoholic and died in an alcohol-induced coma. His brother, Jimmy, killed himself with a shotgun, the same shotgun Jimmy discovered that his wife had used on herself in their home. Jimmy was a compulsively jealous husband who feared his wife would become like his mother. We also see the fall from grace in the motorcycle…

From His sister, we learn that Perry’s family only fell recrimination, pity, regret, fear, and just plain hatred toward Perry.

Deal with Normal and abnormal, illusion and irony.

A victimizer of others, he is himself a victim. A young man capable of murder, he is also strangely gentle. He has aesthetic interests, is fond of drawing and plays the guitar and har- monica. An autodidact, he is always attempting to climb out of the ignorance and deprivation of his background, sometimes using long words that he has just learned instead of simpler ones that would serve him better. In sexual matters he tends to be a puritan, and rebukes Hickock for his failure to restrain his sexual impulses.

In DickToo poor to go to college, he went to work at various jobs including as an auto

mechanic; he married twice and fathered three children, lived beyond his means, went into debt and then into crime. Impoverished and denied, He wanted, “to go to college. Study to be an engineer. But we couldn’t do it. Plain didn’t have the money. Never have had any money” (166). Hickock’s earliest escapades seem to be a reaction to this fiscal situation.

As a boy, Hickock had grown envious of another boy’s seashell collection and, as a result, he had “stolen the shells and one by one crushed them with a hammer. Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have” (200).

"'I still think the reason he started doing stunts such as that was connected with the smash-up. Concussed his head in a car smash-up. After that, he wasn't the same boy. Gambling, writing bad checks. I never knew him to do them things before'" (166).

Following this unfortunate event were “blackout spells, periods of amnesia, and headaches [...] and a major portion of his antisocial behavior ha[d] occurred since that time” (294).

Testimony before Testimony… They get caught by accident. We know the outcome from the very beginning given the moral and culture leanings of Holcomb, despite Alvin Dewey.

We essentially see two persons, Hick crime was his reaction to the socio-economic realities of the U.S. Perry Smith attacked Mr. Clutter he was under a mental eclipse, deep inside a schizophrenic darkness, for it was not entirely a flesh-and-blood man he ‘suddenly discovered’ himself destroying, but ‘a key figure in some past traumatic configuration’ ” (302). Physciatrist

Black and White distinction “recognizes no form of insanity provided the defendant has the capacity to discriminate between right and wrong—legally, not morally” (316). “I think that within the usual definitions Mr. Hickock did know right from wrong.” Confined as he was by the M’Naghten Rule (“the usual defi- nitions”), a formula quite color-blind to any gradations between black and white, Dr. Jones was impotent to answer otherwise. But of course the response was a letdown for Hickock’s attorney, who hopelessly asked, “Can you qualify that answer?” It was hopeless because though Dr. Jones agreed to elaborate, the prosecution was entitled to object—and did, citing the fact that Kansas law allowed nothing more than a yes or no answer to the pertinent question. (330)

Capote invokes the biblical imagery to show the hypocrisy

"a coward." Still, of everyone in all the world, this was the person to whom he was closest at that moment, for they at least were of the same species, brothers in the breed of Cain; separate

They ultimately get executed, we

Men my brothers who live after us,have your hearts not hardened against us.For, if on poor us you take pity,God will sooner show you mercy.—Francois Villon, "The Ballad of the Hanged Men"