Oct 7, 2008

In Cold Blood | Characters

One hesitates to call characters culled from real life "characters," especially when four of the "characters" were cruelly murdered in reality. "Character" seems to trivialize their complexity as human beings. Nevertheless, Capote treats these people, who were alive and complex and had unknowable depth in life, as characters in his fiction, and, with one exception, as two-dimensional figures at that.

The best of traditional fiction characters have a complexity of desire, motivation and feeling that readers attribute to the often bewildering actions of people. Yet authors sometimes find...