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Logos
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Part 1: The Last to See Them Alive
Explanation and Analysis—Willie-Jay's Letter:
Willie-Jay, an incarcerated man who serves as a clerk to the prison chaplain at Kansas State Penitentiary, uses logos, simile, and metaphor in his letter to Perry, which encourages him to leave behind his destructive anger and hatred of others:
Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they’re fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself—in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted.
As a result of a difficult childhood and volatile temperament, Perry speaks angrily about others and the world at large. He reserves particular ire for his sister, Barbara, who has managed to create a happy, ordinary life for herself despite sharing Perry’s background. In Willie’s letter, he urges Perry to overcome his “unreasonable anger.” Using logos, he attempts to reason with Perry, asking him why he despises those who are “happy or content” and arguing that the “source” of Perry’s “frustration” is the happiness of others.
Using a simile, he describes Perry’s resentments as being “destructive as bullets,” suggesting that Perry will inevitably turn to violent crime and self-destruction if he cannot control his temper. Further, he describes Perry’s anger as a “bacteria,” a metaphor drawn from the language of health and medicine. Perry’s “contempt” for others, Perry suggests, is akin to a disease that will leave him “torn and twisted.” Though Capote’s depiction of Willie-Jay is often ironic, and he suggests that Perry is foolish to look up to him, Willie-Jay's letter nevertheless serves as a voice of reason that contrasts with Perry’s explosive temper.
Related Themes:
Part 4: The Corner
Explanation and Analysis—The Wheel of Fortune:
Capote employs an extended metaphor that presents the “system of appeals” in the U.S. legal system as a “wheel of fortune.” When describing Dick and Perry’s lengthy stay on death row, Capote notes that:
The system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably, first in the state courts, then through the Federal courts until the ultimate tribunal is reached—the United States Supreme Court. But even defeat there does not signify if petitioner’s counsel can discover or invent new grounds for appeal; usually they can, and so once more the wheel turns [...] But at intervals the wheel does pause to declare a winner—or, though with increasing rarity, a loser.
Here, Capote compares the system by which those sentenced to death may appeal and re-appeal their sentence to a “wheel of fortune, a game of chance.” Here, Capote’s metaphor imagines those on death row as playing a morbid game, both rising and falling in fortune as the wheel turns. The “participants” of this game must “play interminably,” first in “state courts” and ultimately at the United States Supreme Court. Continuing to employ this metaphorical language of games and chance, Capote notes that, even after “defeat” at the Supreme Court, “the wheel turns” yet again when a lawyer finds “some new grounds for appeal.” Sometimes, however, the “wheel does pause to declare a winner,” whose sentence is dropped, or a “loser,” who is finally executed. In this instance, murderer Lowell Lee Andrews, whose cell adjoined that of Perry, is executed.
