Foreshadowing

In the first part of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote uses the literary device of foreshadowing by describing the tales of two seemingly unrelated stories in an alternating sequence. Capote describes the scenes with the Clutters and then interrupts the Clutter’s story to tell a brief account of Dick and Perry. Back and forth, Capote gives accounts of the two stories one would think had nothing to do with each other, but the reader is sure they must connect eventually. In the scenes after Bobby Rupp leaves the Clutter’s house, Capote segues into a new Dick and Perry section as he writes, “Dick doused the headlights, slowed down, and stopped until his eyes were adjusted to the moon-illuminated night. Presently, the car crept forward” (57). Only sentences after reading about Dick and Perry, Capote cuts back to the Clutter’s story by saying, “She was a classmate of Nancy Clutter’s, and her name was also Nancy—Nancy Ewalt. She was the only child of the man who was driving the car, Mr. Clarence Ewalt, a middle-aged sugar beet farmer”(58). At this point, Dick and Perry are roaming closer to Holcomb so the reader knows it is only a matter of time until the two stories intertwine. The part where Dick and Perry are driving the car at night, is the last time the reader hears of them until after the murder. At the point of being in the middle of page fifty-eight, the reader is still reading the stories as separate tales but what they do not know is that Nancy Ewalt is about to find Nancy Clutter dead in her bed. The way that the completely different stories that appear to be unassociated with each other are told in an interchanging order foreshadows the fact that the two stories would somehow come together.