HERE HAVE IT ANYWAYS

I’ll put it under a readmore though because I’m not a dick (ahahaha see what I did there……that was actually unintentional oop)

Warning: School Essay. Contains racial slurs used in quotation. 

            In Cold Blood by Truman Capote documents the murder of the innocent Clutter family by two individuals, known as Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith. Though Hickock and Smith are described as complete opposite, their personalities click and they band together. Their interactions as a pair greatly manipulate the outcome of their combined decisions, going further together than they would have gotten on their own.

            Physically, Dick and Perry are night and day. The only physical similarity ever really mentioned in the book , “Both, for example, were fastidious, very attentive to hygiene and the condition of their fingernails.”  This is where their similarities end. Dick is pictured almost as an average American; a family that cares for and worries about him, with a father, mother, and siblings. His childhood is described with an overall normal feel, despite the fact that he is scheming, deceitful, and could lie his way out of anything. Despite his slightly misshapen face thanks to a car accident he had been in some years before, Dick still manages to have a silver tongue skilled enough to pass plenty of bad checks that he claims are “a ploy so feeble,” they shouldn’t be able to trick anyone before he and Perry leave the country, yet they manage to fool everyone on their way. Especially when placed next to Perry, he seems bright, trustworthy, and likable. His eyes are the only thing that really tell a different tale; when showed a photo of Dick, Alvin Dewey’s wife is reminded of a “bobcat she’d once seen caught in a trap…the cat’s eyes, radiant with pain and hatred, had drained her of pity and filled her with terror.” In contrast, Perry is viewed as dark, quiet, and dangerous. His father an Irishman and his mother Cherokee, his mixed heritage gave him many problems in his childhood, significantly impacting his development as a person. Upon his mother’s death, Perry and his siblings went through two orphanages. He claims that there was “this one nurse, she used to call me ‘nigger’ and say there wasn’t any difference between niggers and Indians…she’d fill a tub with ice-cold water, put me in it, and hold me under till I was blue.” Perry’s limp is also a factor, and he is embarrassed of it, much the same as Dick’s uneven features. Perry carries an abnormally large amount of aspirin with him wherever he travels due to the large amounts of pain his legs cause him, and there is possibility some of this pain could be psychological. He is also seen as quieter, and more submissive, letting Dick do all the talking whenever possible. His physical appearance has obviously had an indirect influence on his psyche, in comparison to Dick’s obviously more evident confidence.