Adams, Robert Don

While literary critics acknowledge the amoral and criminal behavior of Thomas Ripley, the antihero in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripliad series, many critics fail to recognize Highsmith’s parables in connection to ethical responsibility to the Other and guilt because of falling into complete despair. By examining Ripley’s character through an ethical lens, I contend that Ripley’s inability to connect with others disallows him from engaging in moral behavior that would establish basic responsibility for others. This results in a repetitive cycle of criminality that leads to inner turmoil and a sickness of the spirit. This thesis analyzes the parables in Highsmith’s novels by applying Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics in relation with Soren Kierkegaard’s conception of human existence. Ripley lives a lonely existence because he is unaware of his ethical dilemma, covets wealth at all costs, and fails to recognize that his division from society is at the root of his infinite despair.

By examining Jim Thompson’s novels, published between 1952-1955–The Killer
Inside Me, A Hell of a Woman, After Dark, My Sweet, and Savage Night–this essay
interrogates the relationship created between the narrator and the reader, how the
narrator–and Thompson in turn–highlights certain societal flaws, emphasizing how
ethical consequence is born out of the attempt to attain freedom from one’s cultural
circumstance–both in terms of economic restraint and mental health status. Through this,
Thompson implies that the reader is trapped in similar economic and ethical predispositions.
The reader is often left questioning what they might have done, or been able
to do, in similar circumstances. This creates a larger frame by which Thompson implies
that the reader is trapped in similar economic and ethical pre-dispositions as his narrators.
He highlights societal flaws, demonstrating how the pursuit of freedom of one’s cultural
circumstance bears ethical consequence.

Although the preponderance of modern criticism about The Power and the Glory focuses only on religious themes and concerns, the formal narrative technique of Graham Greene deserves equal consideration. Greene very deliberately and consistently constructs a narrative that uses specific formal devices and linguistic techniques that further enhance a formal rhetorical study of the novel and that augment a thematic analysis of the novel. Greene's formal techniques include shifts in narrative point of view, precise forms of language, changing levels of diction, and specific grammatical devices. By analyzing the narrative techniques and linguistic markers that Greene employs, in conjunction with a theme-based analysis, we achieve great insight into the overall picture of the novel and the state of mind of the characters, particularly the protagonist of the novel, the whiskey priest.