Although I don’t feel that Capote justifies the actions of the killers, he certainly humanizes the killers so that the readers can sympathize with them. As humans, we are inclined to sympathize with dreams and aspirations. Hopes are something every reader can relate to. When Capote introduces Perry’s fantasies, he creates a tiny emotional string between Perry, a cold-blooded killer, and the reader. He mentions, “Singing, and the thought of doing so in front of an audience, was another mesmeric way of whittling hours” (16). The reader sympathizes with this hope for fame. Capote also drops small details, about habits, or hobbies that make the killers more human. He mentions the car kept in Dick’s car, saying, “the previous night, after playing for a party of Dick’s friends, he had forgotten and left it in the car. It was an old Gibson guitar, sandpapered and waxed to a honey-yellow finish” (22). Even this minute detail makes Perry seem more like a human, with hobbies, and talents. The guitar helps to normalize a killer. It creates yet another emotional thread, connecting us to Perry. I don’t think Capote wanted to justify the murders, but to make the murderers themselves more of humans in our eyes, with stories, and pasts.
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I completely agree with this thought that Capote wants to humanize the killers, and as we can see from the movie, Capote himself sympathizes with the killers, mainly Perry. But I think that Capote goes even farther to explain that these killers are not only human but that they are actually a lot like the Clutters. There is a list of items, the bridge motifs, that link Perry and Dick to the clutters. The one I noticed specifically while reading was the coffee. So Capote really tries to get the point across and I think eventually everyone recognizes at least one connection between the killers and the Clutters. (Full list of items: Deformities, no coffee, cigs, mirror gazing, nail biting, worry, bible, car mechanics, guns and shootings, music, diaries, and Chevrolets.)Also, back on to the topic on the humanizing Dick and Perry, one of the most obvious humanizations I found on page 98 when, “Perry was sorry to see them go. He’d begun to credit the make-believe bride.” Perry here obviously doesn’t seem like a guy who would kill a family, but rather a nice person who wants to get married and be happy. The thought of a normal human, not a psychopath.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely with Sonia and Sanjeeve, I think that Capote is really pushing for the reader to sympathize for Perry. So far in the story I had been focused on the Clutters and making out what their imperfections were and how Capote depicts their characters to be, but in section two I really started to feel bad for Perry and, like I felt in the movie, I don’t want Perry to be the killer. There are three main things that make me sympathize for Perry, the dream of the yellow bird taking him to paradise, the poem that Perry wrote to Cookie to break up with her, and the description of the killing told to us for the second time in section two by Mr. Dewey (page 103). First there was the dream with the yellow bird. I think that the yellow bird Capote used to demonstrate more than just the rough times Perry had “She woke me up. She had a flashlight, and she hit me with it. Hit me and hit me. And when the flashlight broke, she went on hitting me in the dark”(93), but I think that Capote is trying to show the lack of a companion in Perry’s life. The fact that Perry is so desperate all throughout his life for some companion, “as years went by, the particular torments from which the bird had delivered him altered: others—older children, his father, a faithless girl, a sergeant he’d known in the Army—replaced the nuns, but the parrot remained, a hovering avenger”(93), is enough that I want to become his friend. The second passage in the book that got me thinking was the poem to his girlfriend (soon to be ex) Cookie. These three stanzas of Perry’s poem to her just struck me to want to cry: “there’s a race of men that don’t fit in,…and they don’t know how to rest…and they want the strange and new”(98). Perry sees himself as not fitting in, and as someone who is (like many people now in Holcomb) are at a loss for ease, and Perry sees himself as trying strange and new things (like what has gotten him into this trouble with Dick in the first place). It seems these three characteristics build up a lethal emotion for Perry that he cannot control and I feel bad for him and wish that I could help him so that he can feel at rest and that he fits in, and maybe even help him to try strange things that are healthy and not that are illegal (as his intentions were/are with Dick). The final passage that has made me sympathize for Perry was Dewey’s telling of the murder. Dewey and his colleagues decide to pluralize the killer into killers and this is their reasoning as to why: “the expert execution of the crimes was proof enough that at least one of the pair commanded an immoderate amount of coolheaded slyness, and was—must be—a person too clever to have done such a deed without calculated motive. Then, too, Dewey had become aware of several particulars that reinforced his conviction that at least one of the murderers was emotionally involved with the victims, and felt for them, even as he destroyed them, a certain twisted tenderness”(103). This whole passage brought two thoughts to mind: Dick set Perry up to be a pawn in his big scheme of things and that Perry had just met some of the potential nicest people he would meet in his life and his single emotion from the three characteristics listed earlier, bound to destroy him, ultimately do and so he kills them. I feel bad for Perry and wish that he would have stood up for the Clutters (a strange new thing for him, to do something good, other than kill them as he did) and to be able to realize that Dick is only messing with him.
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