Unreliable narrators?: representation and responsibility in the new journalism of Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion

Abstract

This thesis takes as its starting point two notable scandals in journalism from the 1980's; the Fatal Vision law suit and the Washington Post 'Jimmy' case. Both cases raise interesting issues about representation and responsibility in the relationship between journalist, subject, and reader, and it is the purpose of this study to discuss how such issues might be magnified in the 'New' Journalism of the 1960s. Spending long periods of time with their subjects while experimenting with the 'literary' possibilities of non-fiction, New Journalists such as Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion arguably exaggerate the usual tensions in the journalist's encounter with his subjects and readers. The first chapter examines Capote's relationship with convicted murderers Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith, the central characters of his 1965 "non fiction novel", In Cold Blood, and also tests his claim to have created a book at once imaginative and "immaculately" factual. Chapter Two looks at the techniques Tom Wolfe uses to describe the interior or emotional states of his subjects in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and questions whether his style of journalism effectively liberates his subjects from the parameters of conventional reporting. A selection of the journalism Joan Didion wrote between 1965 and 1967 will be discussed in the third chapter in terms of both her admitted bias and her attempts to persuade readers to moral positions.