Brenda Rojo

Professor Anne

Writing 10

5 Feb. 2012

Supernatural

In the book , by , on November 15, 1959, the Clutter family was murdered in the city of Holcomb, a small City. After the murder takes place, the small city is left restless and the town lives in fear. The citizens of Holcomb lived in fear because the Clutter’s were one of the most well liked families, and they believe someone who knew them had commit the murder. Capote makes it clear that two main characters Dick and Perry committed the murder without specifically acknowledging that fact. While the whole story is taking place some characters have unusual dreams, visions, and premonitions. Throughout In Cold Blood, Capote expresses how some of the characters undergo supernatural experiences and premonitions.

Perry Edward Smith, one of the murderers of the Clutter family envisions two particular dreams throughout the book and believes that he could foresee what will happen in the future. Perry injured himself in a motorcycle accident and he believed he saw the whole accident happen in his mind before it actually physically occurred. “For instance, right before I had my motorcycle accident I saw the whole thing happen: Saw it in my mind—the rain, the skid tracks, me lying there bleeding and my legs broken” (Capote 90).

Perry deeply believes that he can foresee what is going to happen in the future. Perry also acknowledges that ever since he was a kid he’s been having this dream, “I’m moving through the trees toward a tree standing all alone…It has blue leaves and diamonds hanging everywhere…That’s why I’m there—to pick myself a bushel of diamonds. But I know the minute I try to, the minute I reach up, a snake is gonna fall on me. A snake that guards the tree” (Capote 92). Perry then talks about how he fights the snake off and how the snake swallows his feet first. The snake and the tree somehow resemble the bible in a sense that Adam and Eve weren’t allowed to eat from the tree of knowledge yet the snake convinced them to eat the fruit. Perry also talks about how one of the nuns hit him for wetting the bed in the orphanage and after she hit him, “While she slept, a bird “taller than

Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy,” then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to “paradise” (Capote93). Perry kept seeing this bird because in another time while him and Dick, his partner in the Clutter murder, were fishing

Perry caught a big one and after, “At last, and as in one of his dreams, a tall yellow bird had hauled him to heaven” (Capote 120). It seems that Perry encounters the bird every time he feels he’s in a bad situation or after he experiences an ecstatic event.

Mrs. Johnson Perry’s sister, while thinking about Perry and the family, experiences a supernatural event. Perry’s sister does not want Perry to know where she is because she fears Perry and what he is capable of doing. Mrs. Johnson becomes afraid when the detectives find her because if they found her, Perry has the same chance of finding her too.

She didn’t want to help Perry out she would forbid to even let him inside her home. As she sat thinking, “The front door was locked, but not the door to the garden. The garden was white with sea-fog; it might have been an assembly of spirits: Mama and Jimmy and Fern.

When Mrs. Johnson bolted the door, she had in mind the dead as well as the living” (Capote 187). Mrs. Johnson was not only afraid of the living but she also fears the the spirits of her dead family.

Alvin Dewey an investigator for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation becomes very involved in the case to the point where he and his wife begin to have weird dreams and visions. Dewey decides to go back to the Clutter house and through an upstairs window in the distance he sees a scarecrow that appears to be wearing one of Bonnie Clutter’s old dresses. While he was looking at the scarecrow his wife, Marie Dewey’s dream came to him.

“I was cooking supper and suddenly Bonnie walked through the door. She was wearing a blue angora sweater, and she looked so sweet and pretty…She stayed at the door looking at me…but she shut her eyes, she shook her head, and wrung her hands, and then I heard what she was saying. She was saying, ‘To be murdered…No.No. There’s nothing worse.

Nothing worse than that” (Capote 153). After this incident then Dewey has a dream where he sees Herb Clutter. “Wasn’t Herb Clutter dead? Yet there he was, sitting in the Trail

Room’s circular corner booth, his lively brown eyes, his square-jawed, genial good looks unchanged by death. But Herb was not alone. Sharing the table were two young men…Hickock and Smith” (Capote 196). Dewey saw Mr. Clutter alive in his dream where he chased Hickock and Smith that’s when Dewey and Duntz prepared to shoot, “But as they took aim, the supernatural intervened (Capote 196). Suddenly, Dewey was alone at Valley

View Cemetery where he saw Hickock and Smith laughing as they stood upon the graves of the Clutter family.

Truman Capote incorporated supernatural experiences and premonitions into In

Cold Blood. These supernatural beliefs and premonitions added to the intensity of the story itself, because through these dreams the reader is capable of seeing the different perspectives the characters experienced in the story. Perry seemed to be the most influenced by the supernatural through dreams and premonitions, which made the story come to life. Dreams can tell the reader more than the story can explain itself, because dreams come from within one’s subconscious thoughts and this gives the reader a full on experience.