Andrews' educated accent and the formal quality of his college-trained intelligence were anathema to Perry, who though he had not gone beyond third grade, imagined himself more learned, and enjoyed correcting them, especially their grammar and pronunciation. But here suddenly was someone - 'just a kid!' - constantly correcting him.
[...]
"Don't say disinterested when what you mean is uninterested."
-Excerpt from In Cold Blood, page 318
Finally got around to finishing In Cold Blood today. I hadn't touched it in a few days. Not because I was uninterested or anything like that, it's just that I've had a lot going on this week. But I took a couple of hours this afternoon to sit down and burn through the final chapter and now that I've had a few more hours to give the whole thing a bit of thought, here I am.
Excellent book, no doubt about it. Very well-written from beginning to end, but what struck me most in the final chapter and final pages and Perry and Dick lived out their final days was what the book had evolved into. Once the two of them had been caught, convicted and condemned Capote seemed to spend a great deal of time meditating on mankind's motives for violence. I quite enjoyed how he tried to get into the minds not only of Dick and Perry, but the other inmates on death row. Almost as though he was trying to establish a common thread among the lives and personalities of each man, which as far as I'm concerned turned out to be a fruitless endeavour. Interesting to contemplate though.
Speaking of which, what I found most interesting about that final chapter, about all that meditation on what drives one person to shed the blood of another, was the issue of the townspeople. And the issue of those involved in the case's investigation and prosecution. Basically, everybody on the right side of the law. So many of whom stated that, ordinarily, they're opposed to the death penalty, but in this case...
And really, who can blame them? The average person probably doesn't consider themselves particularly violent, and subsequently, the average person never finds themselves responsible for the slaughter of an innocent family. But when it comes to justice for people savage enough to level a shotgun at those four innocent faces and squeeze that shotgun's trigger four times, a certain bloodlust is awakened within the average person. That typical "forgive a man for any sins" mentality flies out the window in favour of satisfying that primal desire for revenge. For better or worse, they suddenly become quite comfortable with the act of 'judicial homicide,' as Capote put it.
Finally I'll mention the passage that I quoted at the start of this post. Like my previous post on the symptoms of fury rearranging Dick's face, this line stood out for me quite a bit. Mostly because until now I had no idea there was any difference between the meanings of disinterested and uninterested. But now, thanks to one dead killer's steadfast commitment to proper grammar and one dead journalist's steadfast commitment to thorough documentation, I do.
Not a big step forward in expanding my vocabulary, but hey, every little bit helps.
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