One specific aspect that leaves me scratching my head is the amount of mileage covered by Dick and Perry at any given time in the book. Perry reports the sum of all travel is upwards of ten thousand miles - my jaw dropped. I could hardly fathom anyone bouncing around so much in such a short amount of time as a month and a half, which for some reason sounds like a shorter span of time when you say "six weeks". There are a few reasons for this: 1 is that I have access to my own personal vehicle as well as infinite options for public transportation across land, sea, and air and I barely leave the 25 mile radius of my hometown where I lived the first eighteen years of my life. 2 is that I always hear horror stories about hitch hiking and yet they do so flawlessly and are able to move around so much by means of the generosity of fellow travelers. 3 is that distance and time seemed completely irrelevant to the impending doom that awaited Perry and Dick and I think that this was thanks to the juxtaposition of the perspective of the K.B.I. agents - because of the fact that this is a true story and we know the outcome, it feels to us like they are just shy of cracking everything wide open even though the text tells us that the trail to the answer "who-dun-it" has all but run cold. However, simultaneously, Capote characterizes and tells the stories of Hickock and Smith with such sophistication and skill that the audience almost cheers for them, able to somehow nearly forget the atrocities committed by these, pardon my language, seriously fucked up individuals. Another idea concerning time and travel is how this book has transcended time - hailed as one of the first and still the best of its kind. Not only is it still read for entertainment as well as laying the foundation for a creative nonfiction genre, it is still heavily debated and discussed as more comes out about the writing and researching (wink wink nudge nudge) of the book are revealed - not to mention the issues of inserting personal imaginings into real life events.
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