Analysis of the Authors Writing Techniques in Angelous I...

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is an autobiography with a fictional aspect that depicts the life of Maya herself from the time she was eight to sixteen. The in-depth stories reveal the struggle and hardships she faced growing up. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is a true account of the murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959. The book gives a more thorough look at the details of the family and the killers, the book is written to take the events and elevate them into a story, enabling the event to transcend their specific historical moment. Capote assembles the facts and perspectives about the Clutter murder into a narrative, creating that feeling of a fiction book. Maya Angelou’s book reads†¦show more content†¦It fell flat on the big vat of lard and by noontime in the summer the grease had softened to a thick soup.† (pg. 16) The theme in the book was growing up black in the south, and the racism that came with it. The development of the theme is what categorizes the book as a fiction. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings starts out discussing the family and the problems within the family, and as the book progresses it begins to unravel the deeper theme of racism. However, the theme also incorporates the chronological element of the plot and stories into a sequence of life events that make the narrator, Angelou, the person she is. The first person narration is witnessed all throughout the book, every page is told in her perspective and the readers learn more about her than the other characters. Provided, that factor is what gives the book its autobiographical component. Since all of these conventions of fiction are so prominen t the book is considered an autobiographical fiction, but mainly read as if were just fiction. In Cold Blood was written as an account of the murder of a family and to convey the truth behind the fictional facet of the book, Capote uses the convention of point of view by narrating the story from 3 different perspectives: the Clutters, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, and a neutral third person. The alternating perspectives enable the readers to understand both sides of the