by Wayne Spitzer

Created on: June 07, 2009   Last Updated: June 08, 2009

Yellow Avenging Angel in an Annihilating Sky

About 95 pages into In Cold Blood, Capote quotes Andy Erhart as saying, in reference to Herb Clutter, "Everything Herb had, he earned-with the help of God. He was a modest man but a proud man, as he had a right to be. He raised a fine family. He made something of his life." But here as elsewhere Capote dips omnisciently into the character's thoughts, continuing, "But that life, and what he'd made of it-how could it happen, Erhart wondered as he watched the bonfire catch. How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this-smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?"

Capote extends this omniscient POV to include the characters' dreams, as when, while discussing the murders at a Kansas City diner, Perry tells Dick, "Since I was a kid, I've had this same dream." He explains that in the dream he is attempting to pick diamonds from a sort of diamond tree in Africa, but knows that, the instant he attempts to take a diamond, a snake that guards the tree will descend upon him. Writes Capote from Perry's POV, "What it comes down to is I want the diamonds more than I'm afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one, I have the diamond in my hand, I'm pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me. We wrestle around, but he's a slippery sonofabitch and I can't get a hold, he's crushing me, you can hear my legs cracking...he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like going down in quicksand." The conversation is interrupted, of course, by 'Normal Dick,' who only dreams of "blonde chicken." Perry ends the conversation abruptly, saying, "Never mind. It's not important."

But it was! Writes Capote, and it clearly is, says the reader. Thus, because it would be out of character for Perry to further explain the dream to Dick, Capote simply replaces Dick with Willie-Jay, who was, "of course...different-delicate-minded, 'a saint.'" Again, Capote solves the problem by working omnisciently, but also nonlinearly, continuing the story as it was told to Willie-Jay, the story of "the towering bird, the yellow 'sort of parrot'...which had first flown into his [Perry's] dreams when he was seven years old, a hated, hating half-breed child living in a California orphanage run by nuns [whom he will later call "Black Widows"]-shrouded disciplinarians who whipped him for wetting his bed." Capote writes elsewhere-through the prism of various characters-of the murders being a

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