Capote's opening descriptions are hypnotic--as rambling and open as the vast, flat landscape he evokes. The town of Holcomb and the inhabitants he describes seem satisfyingly familiar, dusty, and mundane. Even his voice feels familiar, inviting us to participate in his descriptions when he uses phrases like "unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School..." (4); it's as if we are riding next to him like guests invited to take in the scenery as he treats us to a verbal tour.
And then he shifts gears:
"But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises - on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them - four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives." (5)
That "But" at the beginning of the sentence signals a shift in tone; he jars us out of the comforting, lull of everyday sights and small town bustle with the uneasiness inherent in the piercing sounds of a coyote's "keening hysteria" and a plaintive "receding wail of locomotive whistles" in the dead of night while the town's inhabitants sleep. It's as if the sounds pervading the dark of night symbolize our horror, our grief regarding that unlit, unknowable part of the human soul that from time to time unleashes itself in acts of unexplainable violence which pierce our sense of security and challenge our understanding of human nature.
While the citizens of Holcomb are not awakened by the four shotgun blasts, Capote's suddenly terse description --"At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them - four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives"(5)--wakes us up to the pivotal moment on which rests the fate of the Clutter family, Perry Smith, Dick Hickock, the town of Holcomb, the key themes and questions of Capote's magnificent book, and possibly even our own belief in the rectitude of human nature.
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