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Pornoviolence Tom Wolfe Summary

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It is human nature to occasionally feel the need to break society’s norms. Breaking the law often involves violence and is a form of breaking the norm. It leads people to be driven or drawn towards the concept. In Tom Wolfe’s essay- “Pornoviolence”- Wolfe makes a valuable argument that people are becoming more desensitized towards violence as a whole because of how books, movies, tabloids, and television utilize brutality to grab viewers attention. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Capote retells the gruesome event of a family who was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas. Wolfe implies that Capote promotes porno-violence in the book by delaying the specifics of the deaths that occur. Capote quickly reveals who the killers are and who they killed, but …show more content…

The concluding few pages of the book, once again, revolved around death. Capote created a story that started out with demise and ended with demise. While keeping his audience hooked by switching through various time periods, and foreshadowing: “ ‘ I can’t imagine you afraid. No matter what happened, you’d talk your way out of it… By midafternoon the black Chevrolet…” (Capote 36). This gives the audience a chance to see into the killers minds and their process of finally arriving to kill the Clutters and how they mentally processed their terrible actions.This point of view of the reader attains could cause them to feel sympathy for the criminals by, revealing personal details about their past that are depressing. Constantly using the concept of death in the book with various point of views and implying that a murder scene is going to be portrayed with the changing of time periods, truly makes the readers more excited and more interested in awful events: “...various boys and girls of the year, were out there, suited up, gaily cutting a sequence of dwarves and feebles down to short ribs” (Wolfe 5). The repetition and popularity of violence in society’s media, specifically In Cold Blood, is advocating the idea of porno-

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