In the following essay, Hollowell examines three critical scenes in In Cold Blood to see how Capote ' 'strategically offers an explanatory framework for understanding murder."
In early studies of the new journalism and the nonfiction novel, critics have sought to identify the fictional techniques that make the nonfiction novel "read" like a novel. In The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe speaks of the realistic novel's "emotional involvement," or its "gripping" and "absorbing" quality. Perhaps the most often cited of these devices of realism, according to Wolfe, is "scene by scene reconstruction and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narration." The supposed effect on the reader is a reconstruction of events with full dialogue and psychological depth without the anonymous summary or narration of traditional journalism.
More recent readers of Capote's In Cold Blood have.....
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