Character Clues
Character Analysis
Family Life
Capote uses the depiction of family life as a way of demonstrating certain personal qualities of the characters. Most of the residents and lawmen we meet live with their families, which gives us a sense of their rootedness and stability. Here's a look at Alvin Dewey's household:
"Alvin was singing in the bath. 'The Yellow Rose of Texas.' The kids were watching TV. And I was setting the dining-room table. For a buffet. […] We're going to have a buffet and invite some friends over […]" (3.257)
Doesn't get much cozier than that. He must be a good guy to have a wife and kids that love and support him. We know that whatever happens, whether he gets his killers or not, Alvin is going to be OK.
Perry, on the other hand, has nobody. He's estranged from his surviving family, and his sister's scared to death of him. Neither visits him in prison. We figure out that he's managed to alienate everyone through his actions. It's our guess that, even if he hadn't been caught, his life wouldn't get any better at all. He'd go back to wandering the country and getting nowhere. As he said when he left Kansas, he had no one to leave behind.
Of course, it's easier to be a success if you have a stable family support system, right? But Capote also suggests that if you do have a stable family life, then you've done something to create that. Perry has none of that "something."
Appearance
Capote is subtle in his observations of character, but there's one way in which this book is as subtle as a fairy tale: all the bad guys are ugly, and all the good people are beautiful.
Herb Clutter "cut a man's man figure. His shoulders were broad, his hair had held its dark color, his square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy hued youthfulness." (1.6)
Nancy's goodness is even more lushly evident:
Nancy was a pretty girl, lean and boyishly agile. […] But it was her eyes, wide apart, darkly translucent […] that made her immediately likable, that at once announced her lack of suspicion, her considered and yet so easily triggered kindliness. (1.38)
But then there are our villains, both with menacing tattoos and physical deformities. Here's Dick:
[…] the lips were slightly aslant, the nose askew, and his eyes not only situated at uneven levels but of uneven size, the left eye being truly serpentine, with a venomous sickly blue squint […]. (1.101)
And Perry's "chunky, dwarfish legs" and delicate feet (1.102), in contrast with his bulky and powerful upper body, convey what Capote clearly wants us to see: Perry's contradictory nature, both pitiable child and ruthless killer at the same time. Just the kind of person who might put a pillow under a young boy's head to make him comfortable, then kill him with a shotgun blast a few minutes later.
Social Class
We think Capote also paints with a pretty broad brush when it comes to his depiction of character through social class. The wealthier, more educated residents of Holcomb, and the KBI agents (who we imagine are being paid at least a middle-class wage), are the classiest of the bunch. They're thoughtful, rational types, not prone to angry outbursts or lust for revenge. The quiet dignity of the prominent citizens who were Herb Clutter's friends is on display here:
For feeling it their duty, a Christian task, these men had volunteered to clean certain of the fourteen rooms in the main house of River Valley Farm: rooms in which four members of the Clutter family had been murdered by, as their death certificates declared, "person or persons unknown." (2.2)
The poorer residents of Holcomb—the mail messenger, the hired hand, the café owner—aren't painted as bad people, but they're more emotional and reactive, a little rough around the edges. Their language is more colorful. Here's Myrtle, the postmistress:
"Folks come in here to buy a nickel's worth of postage and think they can spend the next three hours and thirty-three minutes turning the Clutters inside out. Pickin' the wings off other people. Rattlesnakes, that's all they are." (3.150)
Then there's Perry and Dick. They're not really even portrayed as part of society. They're not subject to the rules of any community, and that's what makes them dangerous.