Dick and Perry vs. The Clutter Family

The first part of In Cold Blood gives a sense of who the characters are. The Clutters are the ideal family who spend a majority of their time focused around helping others. While shifting from chapter to chapter, Dick and Perry are these grungy men with tattoos, who drive a black cadillac. It’s like hot against cold each time the chapter is switched. Capote explains how the men are plotting to kill and how this is the last day the Clutter family will witness. In a way Capote’s way of switching characters from chapter to chapter relates the criminals with the “innocent” family. I feel like the Clutter family was the ideal family that everyone looked up to in the story, but cracks under pressure and has underlying problems. Nancy sneaks cigarette puffs, just like her father does when he is stressed. Like Reed posted, she’s under an overwhelming amount of pressure in life to be the perfect girl. Also, her father is supposedly one of the most suburb business man who only writes checks and lives off in this wonderful house thats differentiated from the rest of the town’s houses. The family also has a reputation to have the mother who has “episodes”. Maybe Capote is trying to say that the family isn’t as perfect as it seems and that there were underlying problems that he isn’t able to discover. When the criminals are talked about, they to have many tasks to accomplish in an orderly fashion just like Nancy, but crack under the pressure and end up making many detours in their journey to kill the ideal family. Ultimately the first section of the story is finished with the Clutters being found dead and the killers no where to be found. It appears that the murders did a surprisingly well done job organizing and preparing for the murder just like how Nancy was such a perfect child at keeping her schedule on task. Through it all, the Clutter family doesn’t seem to be a random killing for the murders but the killing had a reason behind it. At the end of the section Capote shows how the killers went on living their fraudulent life, he says, “He arrived home at noon, kissed his mother…” (84) Dick and Perry lived a normal life just like the Clutter family but both had secret lives behind them that none knew of.