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Theme Of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: Taking Safety For Granted

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In Cold Blood: Taking Safety for Granted What effect does tragedy have on a society? It causes panic and everyone in the area to be a little more careful. During In Cold Blood tragedy happens and in the small town where it occurs panic strikes, as a result the once very close and worry free townspeople became strangers to each other and didn’t feel the safety they once had. Prior to this murder the town thought nothing bad could ever happen to them. In In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, irony, foreshadowing, and symbolism are used to show the danger of taking your safety for granted in small town America. Through irony, Capote shows how the town’s idea of the American Dream, safety and the idea of determining their own fate is taken from them. …show more content…

“In fact, as the most banal cliche would have it, they had been”, “sufficiently un fearful of each other to the seldom trouble to lock their doors” (Coniff 5)(Capote 15). The fact that they don’t have their doors locked and that they don’t care about safety, you get the idea that something bad is going to happen which is foreshadowing. This town should have known something bad was eventually going to happen but they were distracted by their own images of the American Dream. “He Headed home and the day’s work, unaware that it would be his last”(Capote 13). This quote foreshadows that Mr. Clutter is going to die later that day. It also shows how it was just a normal night for them and that there was zero concern for safety at all. “Now on this final day of her life, Mrs. Clutter hung in the closet the calico housedress she had been wearing and put on one of her nightgowns and a fresh set of white socks”(Capote 30). This quote shows that for Mrs. Clutter there was no concern for the wellbeing of her and her family, she didn’t lock the doors, make sure her family was ok like any other family would do. Also it foreshadows that her family will die that night and there’s nothing they can do about it. Truman used foreshadowing to portray the theme of taking your safety for

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