Moral of the story? Don't kill people in Kansas!

Or maybe just don’t kill people at all. In the fourth part of this book, The Corner, Capote obviously wanted us to sympathize with the Clutter killers. In the end, when Judge Tate dies, I had very little sympathy for him whatsoever; he just wasn’t a character I agreed with. It seemed to me like the trial in Garden City was very biased and I don’t feel like they had a fair trial, even though we know they committed the murders. Perry is obviously insane for one thing. Insanity and mental illnesses played a pretty large part in this section. One of the definitions I remember most vividly was that you don’t feel a thing when you kill someone. For Perry, it just happened; he killed Mr. Clutter plain and simple. And he didn’t feel any pain or resentment for doing the deed. Perry was insane and I don’t feel like that was fair for him. Also, Dick’s story actually saddened me a little too. At the beginning of the book, all my sympathy was held for Perry and that holds true through the third part. But the fact that Dick has caring parents, and he didn’t actually touch the Clutters yet he is still on the Row kind of annoys me. I guess more than anything, I’m angry at Death Row. The way Capote described it in this book didn’t sadden me. It frustrated and angered me greatly. And what angered me even more was the end of the book. It ends with life moving on for everyone but they all still remember the Clutters. That’s not what annoys me, what annoys me is that the world is Dickless and Perryless. I want to hear more of them, I want to get to know them more, because by this point in the book I can actually picture them, acknowledge their personalities. They were so unique and those two characters alone made this book worth reading.