This document provides a detailed guide to the text, made up of key quotations from across the book to support any point.
It is all organised by different themes and characters which makes revision as well as essay planning so much easier.
This is a full guide as I know how hard finding good In...
Good words to use:
State sanctioned murder
Authorial bias
Authorial intent
Non-fiction novel
The American Dream-
The American dream focuses around the prospect of success and prosperity and
equal opportunity for success but in reality it limits those in lower class positions
from this upward mobility.
Quotes to use for the American Dream:
Herb Clutter, “in the beginning years,he laboured eighteen hours a day”
“After a decade Mr Clutter’s domain consisted of over eight hundred acres owned outright
and three thousand more on a rental basis”
“Always certain of what he wanted from the world, Mr.
Clutter had in large measure obtained it”
Setting-
“Village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome that
other Kansans call ‘out there’”
“The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this
should be do, quite content to exist inside ordinary life”
“At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcolmb heard them- four shotgun blasts that, all told
ended six human lives”
“Sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors”
“Stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbours viewed each other
strangely, and as strangers”
“He had slept alone in the master bedroom, on the ground floor of the house- a two-storey,
fourteen-room frame-and-brick structure”
, “Situated at the end of a long,lane-like driveaway shaded by rows of Chinese elms, the
handsome white house, standing on an ample lawn of Bermuda grass”
“The Clutters had no neighbours within half a mile”
“Mr Clutter seldom encountered trespassers on his property… it was not a place that
strangers came upon by chance”
“How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this-
smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?”
“The odour of windfall apples rotting under the trees”
“It was deprived of the late owners dedicated attention, the first threads of decay’s cobweb
were being spun”
Community-
“Who shot them?... the man in the airplane. The one Herb sued for crashing into his fruit
trees. If it wasn’t him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street. All the neighbours
are rattlesnakes.”
“Neighbours and old friends had suddenly to endure the unique experience of distrusting
each other”
“A thousand persons, largest crowd in the Methodist church's history” (for their funeral)
“After what happened to Herb and his family, I felt something around here had come to an
end”
“Plenty of folk are still keeping their doors locked”
“When the co-ed caught sight of the murderers… it fell silent, as though amazed to find them
humanly shaped.”
Sympathy-
“She set out the clothes she intended to wear to church the next morning.. A red velveteen
dress- her prettiest, which she herself had made. It was a dress in which she was to be
buried.”
“Of all the people in all the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered”
“The family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect”
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