Witness or Accomplice? Shadowing Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley

Résumé En

In the first lines of The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith, the eponymous character imagines being followed by a policeman coming to arrest him. The reader is immediately invited to adopt a dual perspective: that of pursuer, shadowing Ripley’s every move and thought, as the narrator gives us unlimited access to the character’s consciousness, but also that of pursued, as our reading experience is almost exclusively limited to Ripley’s viewpoint. This duality continues throughout the rest of the novel and the Ripliad series (1955-1991), since the “consonant narrator” (Cohn, 1978) enables the reader to experience the protagonist’s doubts and calculations, while depicting the latter’s abhorrent and murderous acts that challenge our impulse to empathize with him (Roszak, 2014). The reader is thus placed in a paradoxical position, refusing to identify with Ripley, and recognizing the odiousness of his actions, while still wanting him to evade detection. This contradictory empathy has been explained by the hero’s personality (Hilfer, 1990, Harrison, 1997) and the use of a limited point of view (Powell, 2012), but this paper intends to link it to Highsmith’s manipulation of her readers through a specific style of narration that erases any moral guidance. The close analyses of extracts taken from all five Ripley novels will show how, instead of a back-and-forth movement from the author’s to the character’s voice, a variety of techniques (including free indirect discourse) blur the lines between the third-person omniscient narration and the character’s pervasive inner discourse, “seducing the reader onto morally slippery ground” (Cook, 2004).