Capote's Presentation of the Murderer's Families Anonymous 12th Grade

Capote presents the murderer’s families as somewhat complicated as he researches them to try and find the motive. As a journalist writing a faction novel, his accounts of the families mostly come from them first-hand – however, he never mentions this as he removed himself from the story entirely (as a part of the New Journalistic features within the novel). Though the novel is seen as a ‘whydunnit’, the motive of the murders is never fully established, and, if anything, the families complicate this more as they fail to be any sort of wicked motivator.

Dick Hickock’s family is presented as utterly typical, described by his own mother as: “… plain people, just country people, getting along the same as everybody else.” This was said to Capote directly, though he says it was to ‘a woman reporter’ to remove himself from the narrative. It demonstrates the mystery of the murders, as the Hickock family are not unusual, or assumed by any one to be the type to raise a criminal. The alliteration of ‘plain people’ reinforces the idea of the family being ordinary, perhaps even mundane. This is then heightened by the adverb ‘just’, which limits anything irregular about them, and rules out that any family oddities had resulted in Dick’s...