Unlike most traditional journalism, In Cold Blood possesses a tremendous power to involve the reader. This immediacy, this spellbinding "you-are-there" effect, comes less from the sensational facts (which are underplayed) than from the "fictive" techniques Capote employs. The narrative reads "like a novel" largely because of the use of scene-by-scene reconstruction instead of historical narration, the ironic heightening of dialogue, and the skillful manipulation of point of view. (pp. 69-70)

Capote wanted it both ways: the impeccable accuracy of fact and the emotional impact found only in fiction. (p. 70)

Capote's skill and experience as a novelist are everywhere evident in the final product. He could not, of course, record all of the events of the Clutters' lives, nor did he dwell on each minute detail concerning the killers. Instead, he chose the scenes and conversations with the most powerful dramatic appeal…. It is precisely Capote's ability to capitalize on the hidden meanings of these significant moments that contributes to the narrative impact of the book. The conversations of close friends of the Clutters, of the chief detectives, and even of the killers themselves are powerfully rendered. (p. 71)

Throughout In Cold Blood, a silent alliance is maintained between the narrator and the reader as Capote presents hidden meanings not apparent to the speakers.

In addition to the use of dialogue to underscore his themes and to heighten suspense, Capote manipulates with the skill of the novelist the point of view from which events are perceived. His choice of third person, omniscient narration promotes "objectivity" and suggests, at the same time, a complex pattern of cause-and-effect relationships surrounding the crime. (p. 72)

Capote's heightening of dialogue and his selection of significant moments to depict suggest that every detail, every fact, is fraught with meaning. Yet the narrator refrains from supplying easy morals. Capote says merely: all this happened, these facts exist. When he does, at times, come close to moralizing or offering an interpretation of the terrible events, he quickly retreats again to simple narration.

Although Capote does his best to minimize direct commentary, the ideal of perfect neutrality … is impossible. The sequence in which events are presented is another form of heightening. (pp. 72-3)

Capote must have realized that the final narrative presents only one version of the facts. In Cold Blood, despite its scrupulous adherence to verifiable events, suggests the impossibility of any "objective" history, since any attempt to write a narrative account implies establishing a "fiction" that best fits the facts as they are known. (p. 74)

The main dramatic interest of the book—Capote's greatest accomplishment—is his portrayal of Perry Smith. More than the social critic's indictment of injustice, or the crime writer's concern for a "whodunit" plot, the novelist's concern for character analysis and moral ambiguity dominates In Cold Blood. A detailed examination of the portrayal of Perry Smith will reveal three things about the nature of this nonfiction novel: (1) the affinity of Smith's character to the characters of Capote's fiction; (2) the methods of heightening dialogue and scenes; and (3) the legitimacy of Capote's claims that In Cold Blood should be considered literature rather than journalism.

Although Capote was proud of the prodigious research and legwork that contributed to In Cold Blood, his themes as a novelist intrude themselves upon the observable facts collected by the journalist…. Capote perceived in the Kansas murders some of the preoccupations of his stories and novels.

Like the protagonist of a Capote gothic story or novel, Perry Smith is a loner, a psychic cripple, almost from birth an outcast from society. (p. 75)

Capote enlists the reader's sympathy for Perry Smith from the outset, frequently by comparing him to wounded animals. In fact, Smith is more often described as a frightened "creature" than as a human being responsible for his actions….

Capote's presentation also shows that Perry has been wronged by society. Although we tend to see Perry ironically because of his self-delusions, we are also provided with the testimony of his prison friend Willie-Jay who sees him as "sensitive" and "artistic." (p. 76)

Because the descriptions of Smith draw freely on the resources and obsessions of Capote's fiction, they serve to reveal clearly the imprint of dramatic heightening. Capote's sympathy for both killers as persons, as unique individuals, elevates the nonfiction novel above the pulp detective story…. Ultimately. Capote raises without answering the important questions of how a man can be so riddled with contradictions and how our society could have produced such a man.

Beyond these techniques of characterization, In Cold Blood lies closer to fiction than to journalism on what might be called a symbolic level. Capote's treatment of the "facts" creates a context of meaning beyond these particular killers, this particular crime. He weaves the facts of the case into a pattern that resonates with the violence of an entire decade of American life. And yet, how, exactly, does the book achieve this suggestive power? How does it become universal in a way that most reportage is not? (pp. 77-8)

Robert K. Morris suggests in a provocative essay on Capote's imagery that the selective repetition of certain images, landscapes, and atmospheric details creates a cumulative impact. As in Capote's fiction, Morris explains, the environments of In Cold Blood are "the 'lonesome areas' of 'out there' where people are isolated, muted, rarely able to vent their cry of loneliness or anger or impotence or fear, and perhaps never heard when they do."…

Melvin J. Friedman contends that Capote's exploitation of these remote, almost uninhabitable environments allies him with French experiments in the nouveau roman, notably the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet. (p. 78)

The most striking similarity between In Cold Blood and such new novels as Les gommes or Portrait d'un inconnu is the technique of repeating certain landscapes and inanimate objects…. Capote's position in In Cold Blood is not nearly so radical as that of the French new novelists, but he shows a similar predisposition to present landscapes, environments, and objects in repeated patterns. He leaves to the reader the attribution of value and the responsibility of moral interpretation. He resists the temptation to impose meaning or to moralize upon fundamentally inexplicable events. (p. 79)

[Despite] Capote's relentless care to present only the facts and his reluctance to impose a too easy moral, his story achieves in the end a kind of mythic significance. The destiny of an archetypal American family crosses paths with warped killers whose vengeance is portrayed more as the result of fate than of human motivation…. This mythic dimension of Capote's story dawns on the reader gradually and subtly. First of all, the Clutter family is shown to typify all of the traditional American values. Herbert Clutter is a man whose prosperity is built upon hard work, endurance, and faith in God. He is a pillar of the community, a local booster, and a successful farmer—a man who has played hard by the rules and won.

In the eyes of Holcomb's people, Herbert Clutter and his family represent the American Dream come true. (pp. 79-80)

Once this mythic dimension of the Clutters is established, we see that their inexplicable deaths profoundly disrupt Holcomb's ethical universe. For by all the conventional values of our society, and most of our ready notions of good and evil, such murders are incomprehensible. (p. 80)

If the Clutters are portrayed as representatives of the American Dream, Hickock and Smith are shown to be agents of fate rather than morally culpable human beings. The reader is asked to view Perry Smith's crime as the product of a "brain explosion"—a "mental eclipse"—rather than an act for which he is responsible. The role of fate in shaping Smith's personality gradually emerges as Capote recounts his family background. (pp. 80-1)

[In Cold Blood is] more than merely a documentary. It is almost a moral allegory of an innocent family struck down by killers who are themselves victims of fate. The Clutters stand for everything in life that Perry Smith found unattainable: sustaining love, economic security, an orderly existence based on simple virtue. (p. 82)

[The] difficulty of placing In Cold Blood generically brings into clear focus a long-standing critical problem. How do we distinguish fiction from nonfiction? What are the basic differences between literature and mere journalism?…

First we might ask what a novel is. In Anatomy of Criticism Northrop Frye concludes that "any literary work in a radically continuous form, which almost means any work of art in prose," might be considered a novel. Second, Frye declares that a novel must be "made for its own sake," that is, for intrinsically aesthetic rather than didactic purposes. By both these criteria, then, In Cold Blood would qualify. (p. 83)

Perhaps because it was written by a novelist, many reviewers have considered In Cold Blood on aesthetic rather than didactic grounds—as they would a novel. Yet in the Library of Congress system it is placed under nonfiction, in a category of "social pathology" including murder case histories…. These discrepancies merely demonstrate our critical problems in classifying certain works. In the end, attempts to place a work like In Cold Blood definitely in a generic category appear doomed…. Perhaps a more manageable problem than whether Capote has established a new literary form is to examine why he might have made such extravagant claims.

As we have seen, Capote's role as a literary promoter is foremost. His rhetoric of originality neglects to mention a whole tradition of true crime books he found it convenient to ignore. The author's tactic of imposing a polemical definition of his work, however, is a familiar one. In the eighteenth century, Fielding called Joseph Andrews "a comic epic poem in prose." Like Fielding, Capote wanted to appropriate for himself the prestige of his era's dominant literary form and, in part, to shape the critical standards for judging his work. (pp. 83-4)

Capote's insistence upon the sanctity of his new genre, however, reflects an impossibility, a romantic yearning for more than the form he chose will allow. For while In Cold Blood is an extremely well-documented and dramatically satisfying account of a case history, it follows in a well-established tradition. Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, and Dreiser's An American Tragedy were all drawn from actual case materials. Perhaps the most recent example of the genre, and the closest to In Cold Blood, is Levin's Compulsion, which the author calls a "documentary novel." (p. 84)

In Cold Blood exemplifies the seemingly random, meaningless crime that became symptomatic of America in the sixties. For implicit in the story of the Kansas killings are larger questions about the social dislocations of the sixties and the failure of conventional morality to explain away the senseless violence we read about daily in the newspaper. Ultimately, Capote's story of Perry and Dick and the Clutter family transcends the here and now, the merely local and particular that are the hallmarks of journalism. (p. 85)

John Hollowell, "Truman Capote's 'Nonfiction Novel'," in his Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (copyright © 1977 by The University of North Carolina Press), University of North Carolina Press, 1977, pp. 63-86.