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Foreshadowing
Part 1: The Last to See Them Alive
Explanation and Analysis:
A nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood is broadly considered a prototypical example of true crime, a genre that focuses on the victims and perpetrators of actual crimes. In In Cold Blood, Capote turns his attention to the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Throughout, he describes the events leading up to the murders as well as their aftermath. Establishing the broader context of that tragic evening, he writes:
Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb [...] But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises [...] At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again [...]
Here, Capote describes the “shotgun blasts” that ended the lives of husband and wife Herb and Bonnie Clutter, as well as their two youngest children, Nancy and Kenyon, as “foreign sounds” that “impinged” upon the usual quiet of the rural Kansas town. Though later researchers have found that Capote’s account of the murders contains various inaccuracies, he largely sticks to the established facts of the case, detailing both the motives that led to the murders as well as their consequences. After the murders, Capote writes, the once-trustful residents of Holcomb began to become suspicious of their neighbors, locking their doors, developing their own theories as to the identities of the murderers, and “re-creating” the murders “over and over again” in their own minds. Like other works in the true crime genre, Capote depicts the broader context of the murders, offering detailed psychological portraits of both victims and perpetrators.
