SOURCE: “The Metaphorical World of Truman Capote,” in Western Review, Vol. 15, No. 4, Summer, 1951, pp. 247–60.

In the following essay, Aldridge provides a stylistic analysis of Capote's short fiction, contending that the characters in Other Voices, Other Rooms function as metaphors of one another.

On the face of it, Truman Capote would seem to be just about the most promising new writer we have in America today. Not only is he the most precocious of the group of younger novelists whose first books began attracting attention right after the war, but he has already displayed an idiosyncrasy of vision and temperament which has ended, literarily, in the creation of a world unmistakably his own and, publicly, in the creation of a mythical personality of considerable charm and color. When compared with his contemporaries, Capote at once seems remarkable for his rigid adherence to his personal bias, his refusal merely to...