Capote’s biographer, Gerald Clarke, has suggested that “In Perry [Smith]… [Truman] recognised his shadow, his dark side, the embodiment of his own accumulated angers and hurts.”

Given Capote’s strong sense of identification with his primary subject, discuss the extent to which the character of Perry Smith can be seen as sympathetically portrayed in Capote’s novel. Evaluate the appropriateness of any such depiction given Smith’s status as a multiple killer.

Smith, an aggressive and somewhat mentally perturbed individual, much like his father, had been incarcerated in 1956 for jailbreak, car theft and grand larceny, in the state of Kansas, and was sentenced to a minimum of five to ten years. In the state penitentiary was where he first met Richard Hickock. In prison together they schemed to raid Herbert Clutter’s household for a safe which Hickock had been informed by Floyd Wells (another Kansas State Penitentiary inmate) contained a large sum of money believed to be no less than ten thousand dollars. Wells, who had worked for Clutter, had been adamant that the farmer kept a substantial measure of money in his southwestern Kansas farm home.

When Smith became eligible for parole in 1959 he visited his father in Reno, Nevada, and planned to go with Tex, his father, away to Alaska. However once again like many times before the two fell out and Smith left. He spent four weeks in Las Vegas until getting in contact with Hickock once again upon his release and duly left for Kansas City on November eleventh in order to map out exactly what needed to be done in the robbery.

Throughout the course of the novel despite being a “Cold Blooded” murderer Truman Capote's portrayal of Smith is a perhaps strangely sympathetic one and often refers to him as having had very little opportunities in life and everything that could have gone wrong for him quite simply always does. Some critics of the book speculated that Capote, a publicly announced homosexual and a creation of a very distressing childhood, identified somewhat with Smith's traumatizing and mentally challenging childhood and grew close to him through a mutual understanding the two shared through this. Certainly there is evidence to suggest that in the five years Smith was on death row Capote and him grew close in a somewhat estranged relationship.

George Plimpton, an author and editor, in “Truman Capote”, quoted Harold Nye, Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent, as unequivocally stating "they had become lovers in the penitentiary”, despite a distinct lack of substantial evidence of the events he said that “ they spent a lot of time up there in the cell, he spent a considerable amount of money bribing the guard to go around the corner ", fuelling the fire of this statement Capote was unable to watch Smith be hanged after Hickock, even departing from the building overcome with grief.

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Already it would appear that perhaps the sympathy that Capote attributed to Smith through his novel was for that of someone he not only related to in sense of misgivings throughout his life, through a sense of being hard done by at every turn with the world against them, but conceivably because of a relationship developed through such misgivings and empathetic feelings that Capote developed towards Smith due to totally understanding his situation and perhaps feeling that in another life he could well have been in his very same position had events gone differently.

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