Snakes

Capote uses snakes throughout the story to help the reader infer that Dick and Perry will be caught eventually. The snake in Perry's dream symbolizes that, in due time, they will both be arrested. Perry stands before a tree of diamonds and thinks, "Thats why I'm there-to pick myself a bushel of diamonds. But I know the minute I try to, the minute I reach up, a snake is gonna fall on me," (92). Perry wants those diamonds (whatever it was that he was looking for the night he killed the clutters) but the snake stops him and it appears he never gets the diamonds (he never gets what he's looking for and eventually gets arrested). As stated in the previous sentence, the diamonds are metaphors for the murders that had so recently been committed and the snake is a metaphor for the arrest that is soon to take place. Later in the dream, Perry fights with the snake, but eventually, "he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like going down in quick sand," (92). This line is again a metaphor regarding the arrest and after the arrest. It could imply that Perry and Dick struggle with the police, as Perry struggles with the snake. It is more likely, however that the struggle with the snake refers to the difficult process that Capote went through, finding new lawyers, applying for an appeal, etc to keep Dick and Perry alive as long as he needed to. Though, in the end, Perry is eaten by the snake, which is symbolic of the eventual demise of the killers. Capote excellently uses snakes in the story to foreshadow and make the reader keep guessing what will happen next.