The Modernist period of Literature, Literature being the operative word, seems to be a period were all the rules of the past changed. No longer were we praising god and creating legends out of men, or criticizing government with satire. No, Modernist Literature existed as a level of extreme fear and aloofness. “God is dead” a statement with intense fire in Arthur Millers The Crucible may very well define the entire genre of modernist literature. In Modernism the characters are alone, and are principle characters stop being heros and become one step away from being villians themselves. In this godless existance they eternally alone, never making connections forever trapped in the hells they make for themselves.

Modernist tools such as disrupted story lines, unique perspectives, the internal landscape, and the self-imposed isolation, as well as the Anti-hero of pulp fiction, can be found far outside of the realms of fancy: in the every day world of ordinary human beings. In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood a movie adaptation by Richard Brooks of Capotes nonfiction Novel about the Clutter family murders, focusing primarily upon Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the killers. From the very begining of the movie the timeline is extremely convulated, only showing the crime near the end of the film, allowing the viewers that one shred of hope in there minds that maybe, just maybe, they were innocent. Now that statement is incontrivertibly false, they most definately did kill the family, however Capote’s use of disrupted story line gave readers/viewers an oppurtunity to gain sentimentality with the killers and to grow to actually like them as people, so that there death is all that more of a powerful scene at the end. The work was groundbreaking in that it established a new perspective, it allowed an average person to make a connection with these men, and realise that outside of there crime, and therefore outside any mental illness, there were really good guys who were almost victims of fate. Alvin Dewey said in the movie “In the end we have 6 murders” the four Clutters, Perry, and Dick. Perry’s life especially demonstrates the self-imposed isolation. He had spent his entire life with an abusive father who might as well have killed his mother, and nearly killed him with a (luckily) unloaded shotgun. Perry knew he wasnt ready for parole. It is only after he got the oppurtunity to speak with psychiatrists during his five years on death row that he is able to understand how his own mind was fractured and how he was capable of such terrible acts of violence.

Trumen Capote made excellent use of the tools the modernists before him had created, and with him he took an intrigueing true event and made the world realise that although the killers had massacreed a family they were not animals they were humans, the same as you and me. A perfectly distressing thought that falls right into modernism.