Evil In 'Perry & Dick's Black Chevrolet'

Lending a sense of mobility to evil in passage 1, Perry& Dick’s “black Chevrolet” is the personification of a dark interior juxtaposed against the banality of the murderers’ outward appearance. This image undercuts the sense of routine and stagnation in Mr Helm’s assertion of “nothing out of the ordinary” happening the last time he’d seen the Clutter family alive. Evil’s sense of mobility is not only employed by Capote with regard to the murderers through the Chevrolet but is reinforced ominously in “this time” after “parked” emphasising a constant change of scenery, alluding to not only the mobility, but the mutability of evil. Within these contrasting landscapes, however, is the interlocking binary of good and evil, which is made apparent
Passage 2 has him think of himself as “balanced, as sane as anyone” demonstrating a moral perversion not only in the direct rejection of Perry’s remorseful (albeit cognitively dissonant) “there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did” but in the infantilisation of ”Little Perry”, “such a kid” with “something wrong” with him to exhibit the “peculiarities” he does. It is Dick’s privilege, his sound home life with a father who is stuck with his bounced checks and a mother of whom he has nothing bad to say, which insulates him from actively understanding and caring for Perry as he calls through cries in his sleep “Dad, I been looking everywhere, where you been, Dad?” Likewise, it is Dick’s white privilege that isolates him from the ability to understand the cultural context of explaining and trivialising Perry’s “inward rage” as “a fury ‘quicker than ten drunk Indians’” which, for Perry whose mother was Native American, the understanding and systemic consequences of are
Capote illustrates the Clutters’ isolation and lack of awareness of the other America, comprised of those who have been thrown off the escalator of economic success, in that they possess an insularity which makes them vulnerable to external forces of those whom the dream eludes. The “snakes” that “slither” into the seemingly idealised Valley Farm represent the dichotomy of those who’ve had the dream elude them. Dick, who is to steal it from the Clutters is contrasted with Perry, whose fragmented psyche and moral ambiguity are resultant of the systemic abuse inflicted upon him through religious and social institutions, Juxtaposed against the Clutters Perry’s life had been devastatingly taxing, and left him deeply wounded whereas the Clutters had a seemingly idealised existence, ‘time never weighed on Perry’ whereas Herb Clutter was ‘always busy’ and their fatal interaction depicts the collision of the two Americas. One of hard work’s validation through remuneration, the other where the dream only serves to elude those who have only been victims of their