How Does Truman Capote Describe The Town Of Holcomb, Kansas?

In Cold Blood Rhetorical Analysis Essay Although Capote conveys the Clutters as a simple mid western family, his primary purpose was to display how pivotal the Clutters were to the flow and function of Holcomb’s community, therefore; Capote asserts that everything in life is a chain reaction, nothing just affects one individual. Though the Clutters are seen to be a typical mid western family, with their traditional values, hard working spirit as well as with their high standards of class and dignity. They are to Holcomb what an engine is for a car. They are essential for the town to run properly. This practically seen through Nancy, arguably the most upstanding of all of the Clutters.

How does Capote describe the town? Note the diction that is used. Consider the description on page 4: “Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its peeling sulphur-colored paint, is

Griffin Imelio Mrs. Morrison AP English Language and Composition 3 September 2014 In Cold Blood Truman Capote 1. ‘’The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some 70 miles east of the country side, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West.... The land is flat and the views are awesomely extensive: herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.’’ (3).

This is explaining how it helped the “dead nation” of Camelot come to life with the newspaper by giving the people something to hear about their town, for them to be interested in.

In Our Town, Thornton Wilder arranges an empty stage to portray life in Grover’s Corner as a stereotypical American town, and he seeks to enlighten his audience on a more relevant aspect of the seemingly boring village in this way. Wilder puts emphasis in displaying an altogether normal community through the narration of the stage manager and the stage presentation to provide viewers with an understanding of the emotional complexity of a human’s life. For instance, in the beginning of act one, he sets a literal stage as an introduction into the setting of the story: “No curtain. No scenery. The audience, arriving, sees an empty stage in half-light.

What is the American Dream? Our society has us believing that if we are ever going to be happy, we have to be rich, famous, or powerful. The media has led our generation to think we need to be entitled to own luxury cars, wear certain clothing brands, or own the newest technology. If you ask any teenager what their dream is it has to involve with becoming rich by their dream high top job or being in the light of fame. Capote’s view on an American dream is that all you need to be happy is to settle for having a house and a job that provides for you and your family.

In the book, “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote takes us through the lives of the murderers and the murdered in the 1959 Clutter family homicide, which transpires in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. The first chapter, “The Last to See Them Alive,” vividly illustrates the daily activities of the Clutter family—Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon—and the scheming plot of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith up to point where the family is found tied up, and brutally murdered. In doing so, he depicts the picture-perfect town of Holcomb with “blue skies and desert clear air”(3) whose safety is threatened when “four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives”(5). Through the eyes of a picture perfect family and criminals with social aspirations, Capote describes the American Dream and introduces his audience to the idea that this ideal was no more than an illusion. Herbert Clutter: the character Capote describes as the epitome of the American Dream.

The play Our Town is about the people of a small town of Grover's Corners in New Hampshire. This play focuses mainly on two families, the Gibbs and the Webbs. The play portrays teenage years, love and marriage, and death throughout the three acts. Throughout the play, Emily Webb, Mrs. Gibbs, and Joe Crowell suddenly die suddenly when they had their whole lives ahead of them. Wilder conveys that death happens at any time so one should live every day like it will be their last.

“He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had—a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City's First Methodist Church,a congregation totaling seventeen hundred ,most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire.’’ (10) ( Culture and Community ) Capote used this quote to illustrate the culture of the village of Holcomb, where Mr.Clutter lived and how the social life of a religious family is rooted in their church. This quote represents culture, because is trying to tell us that people in Holcomb should live a life according to their religion ,because their actions affect their social circle and their community.

Although, Holcomb is written as a picture-esque mid-west utopia in the first chapter of In Cold Blood, Capote uses personification, parallelism, and the inclusion of first hand accounts, to describe its shift from a neighborly society to one of locked doors in order to comment on how one event can completely alter a locations image. Through the use of personification, Capote describes the disillusion in the townspeople of Holcomb, product of the murder of the Clutter family. Capote writes that locks and bolts are the most popular item in a Garden City hardware store, and that the people disregarded brand identity just to have the security of the ownership of a lock. Capote latter writes, “Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in” (Capote 88), to show how paranoia has consumed the townsfolk are by expressing the false sense of security that a door lock provides. The use of “imagination can open any door”, implies that if someone needed to get through a locked door,

In In Cold Blood, the story takes place in Kansas. Holcomb, Kansas; a small town where everyone knows everyone with friendly little elders. “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there .” The book starts

He could imagine his deception of this town “nestled in a paper landscape,” (Collins 534). This image of the speaker shows the first sign of his delusional ideas of the people in his town. Collins create a connection between the speaker’s teacher teaching life and retired life in lines five and six of the poem. These connections are “ chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard,” which compares images that the readers can picture.

The novel is set in the “tired old town” of Maycomb, Alabama (Lee 6). The fictitious town grew inward and was “an island in a patchwork sea of cottonfields and timberlands” (Lee 174). When it rained, the streets became red slop, grass grew on the sidewalk, and the courthouse subsided in the town square (Lee 6). Stores encompassed the courthouse square, and large Chilean pines abounded every corner of it. (Lee 200).

All the lights are out and everybody's asleep, nescient of the night welkin that's bursting with life and the cypress bush writhing in front of them. This depicts some remotely alienation and ignorance. I feel that the somnolent village represents the rest of the world, nescient of whatever raging passions and agony Van Gogh was going through at that moment. Perhaps this is why the houses seem to appear so far away albeit they are genuinely more or less in the foreground.

In his essay “Here,” Philip Larkin uses many literary devices to convey the speaker’s attitude toward the places he describes. Larkin utilizes imagery and strong diction to depict these feelings of both a large city and the isolated beach surrounding it. In the beginning of the passage, the speaker describes a large town that he passes through while on a train. The people in the town intrigue him, but he is not impressed by the inner-city life.