How Does Capote Use Personification Symbolize In To Kill A Mockingbird

Although Capote writes of how welcoming and peaceful the Kansas town of Holcomb is, his main purpose of describing the town is to emphasize the changes that take place in the wake of one family’s murder, therefore Capote is able to articulate the shifts in the community into an embodiment of a seventh death.
Capote utilizes personification to add a sense of fear to the pallet of feelings that the citizens in Holcomb have been constrained to. He first describes how out of character the town has become simply by their purchase of locks, and goes on to discredit the locks by saying: “Imagination, of course, can open any door---turn the key and let terror walk right in” (Capote 88). The personification of imagination, making it able to open any door, gives the thought of imagination a complex connotation. It makes the reader contemplate of the possibilities that a non-physical concept can make possible in the physical world.

It is a symbol. Capote artfully depicts the fire as “...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 79). In this case the significance of the fire is to symbolize the passing of potential. Including the teddy-bear in the list, tears at a heartstring because it indicates the robbing of a young life, a life that would have been bursting with potential. Yet reducing all of the bloodied garb, such as the bear, to mere smoke, which is quick to vanish, iterates the fragility of life. A fragility in which lies so much love, uniqueness, and potential, but manages to dissipate as smoke. Altogether the shift in atmosphere, loss of trust, and disappearance of potential combine to make a hard-hitting seventh death in the community of Holcomb,