Thursday, November 19, 2009

In the last 15 pages of this third section, Capote once again makes allusions to and uses metaphors from texts and cultures in history. Time and again, Capote makes an allusion to the Egyptian culture. This time it comes when Dick and Perry are taping Mrs. Clutter, and she is wrapped, “like you’d wrap a mummy” (243). This is interesting because only the pharaohs and more important people in the Egyptian culture actually had the honor of being mummified. By using this metaphor, we not only can visualize what they did, but Capote puts an image in our heads that the Clutters are like the Pharaohs of the town of Holcomb and by murdering them, Dick and Perry have done something terrible. Along with Egyptian culture, Capote also takes a page out of Shakespeare’s book in his use of birds, referring to Dick as a crazed woodpecker in order to show how much of a lunatic he is. However, more important is that Capote also uses the motif of unnatural things happening when people are murdered. In both Julius Caesar and Macbeth, we are told that unnatural things occur after a murder, like horses eating each other or the sky begins to rain fire. Capote uses this same idea, but with actual feasible weather patterns. Throughout the book, there has been mention about the oddity of the Indian Summer that Kansas is having. Now that doesn’t seem that strange and there is not much of a mention of weather again until the murders are caught. As they enter the courthouse, the first snows fall of the year, which is sometime in January. As Capote closes the section with this image, it seems like the unnaturalness of the Indian Summer ceases as soon as the world will be put back in order and Dick and Perry punished for murdering the ‘royalty of Holcomb.’

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