Unlikely Partners

I don't want to say I didn't expect this, but more so I wasn't thinking that this would happen, but Perry actually showed some mercy and sympathy toward the Clutters. 

I guess I expected someone who was capable of killing four people in one night to be some kind of psychopath, but Perry is a real person like us deep down. I'm not condoning the murders, don't get me wrong, but I expected them to be crazier than they were. 

Dick definitely went a little mad. Especially after they got to the house and found that the safe they had hoped to find was not there. Then again, if I traveled hundreds of miles to find something that wasn't there at the end, it would drive me pretty batty too. 

I'm interested in the difference between Perry and Dick. Dick didn't seem to show any type of care for the Clutters. He completely removed himself from any type of feeling for the Clutters. Perry on the other hand, found himself pleading with Dick to have mercy on them. Perry was the one who tried to make the Clutters more comfortable. He tucked Nancy into her bed, he put a pillow under Kenyon's head, he laid Mr. Clutter down on a spare mattress in the basement, all out of empathy. 

Yet, Perry admits to having the snap judgement after they had killed the Clutters about wanting to kill Dick. Dick had talked about how there would be no witnesses, and he was a witness after all. 

It's so strange that Perry seems to care less about his partner who has helped him and has his back for so many years over this family that he planned to rob and murder if the need arose. 

The sad part of this is, at the end of this. All they got out of this was between forty to fifty dollars, and god knows how many years in jail after all this has been decided. Perry probably wouldn't have gone through with the murder at the end of the day, and he just went along with what Dick was doing. I wonder if his course of action would have been different had he been acting alone. Maybe not, but I can't help but wonder since Perry and Dick seem to have completely different interactions, feelings and morals in this situation. I wonder how they ended up as partners too. I would think Perry would have known that he wouldn't have the guts to kill someone and that was part of Dick's plan all along. I can't imagine going along with something like that when deep down you can feel that it's not right. I guess we'll never have these answers, but I can't help imagining what was going on in their minds. 

As a side note: I lied when I said this was the last section. There is one more (I think?) called "Corners". Sorry!