The Talented Mr. Ripley

Tom is an orphan, brought up by an uncaring relative after the death of his parents. He has been alone for many years and has always felt himself to be an outsider, longing for acceptance. Throughout the novel, Tom strives for insider status, but it continually evades him.

One reason that Tom always remains on the outside is that he disdains every group that includes him. Groucho Marx famously said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” Tom seems to agree with this notion, as he disdains his friends in New York. But when he goes overseas, his same standards apply. When he gains popularity in Venice, he looks down on everyone there—even as he has gained insider status, he places himself on the outside. When he stumbles into a cocktail party, Tom finds himself in the company of titled Europeans, and yet he is not impressed: “He often asked people to repeat what they had said. He was terribly bored. But he could use them, he thought, to practice on” (206). Even when he is in danger of being caught by the police, he never seriously considers leaving Europe, just because of his standards: “he could never acquire the circle of friends—not unless he went to Istanbul or Ceylon, and what was the use of acquiring the kind of people he would meet in those places?” (176) He longs to be an insider but makes it nearly impossible for himself to achieve that status.

Tom has a very specific idea of the group he wants to be a member of and will accept nothing less—essentially, Dickie’s European and American counterparts, who equal him in social status and wealth. But this is complicated by the fact that he can never be close to anyone of Dickie’s social status because his secret might be exposed. This obstacle did not occur to Tom in his dreams of becoming Dickie: “He had imagined himself acquiring a bright new circle of friends with whom he would start a new life. Now he realized that it couldn’t be. He would have to keep a distance from people, always” (176). He tries to put a positive spin on this knowledge: “If he had to drift about the world entirely alone, so much the better: there was that much less chance that he would be found out. That was one cheerful aspect of it, anyway, and he felt better having thought of it” (176). But, although attaining Dickie’s wealth has given Tom some of what he wants, Dickie’s social status was what he was really after, and in an ironic twist, by seeking to steal it, Tom has ensured that it is now permanently out of his grasp.

Tom’s desire to be an insider and his fear of being thrust to the outside provides the final impetus for Dickie’s murder. Tom experiences his closest sense of belonging during the height of his relationship with Dickie. However, on the train to San Remo, he begins to sense that Dickie is withdrawing from him: “Dickie’s polite cheerfulness on the train was like the cheerfulness of a host who has loathed his guest and is afraid the guest realizes it” (93). He believes that “he had failed with Dickie, in every way” (97) but blames Dickie: “his failing had not been his own fault, not due to anything he had done, but due to Dickie’s inhuman stubbornness” (97). When he realizes that he will soon be an outsider again, he blames Dickie, and it becomes the motivation to kill him.

The only time Tom feels like an insider, outside of his brief relationship with Dickie, is when he is in Paris, impersonating Dickie. After Tom assumes Dickie’s identity, he goes straight to Paris, which he has been longing to see since he arrived in Europe. He quickly falls in with a group of French people and American expatriates, social equals of Dickie. At first, he is elated: “How many Americans alone in Paris could get themselves invited to a French home after only a week or so in the city?” (122). He is excited by his sudden insider status, which he attributes to the persona he has assumed as Dickie: “Tom felt completely comfortable, as he had never felt before at any party that he could remember. He behaved as he had always wanted to behave at a party” (122). He is briefly fully confident and accepted by the Parisian aristocratic class, which, as he notes, is notoriously exclusive. Yet he returns to Rome, again leaving acceptance behind.

At the end of the book, Tom is alone, traveling to Greece, and appears to have resigned himself to being an outsider. The only connection he forges is with an elderly English woman on the ship, another character who belongs to the social class to which Tom aspires. He imagines taking her flowers, illustrating the depth of his isolation by narrowing his possible connections to those who, even if they may not interest him personally, live up to his high standards. Tom, it seems, is doomed to be an outsider. But by the end of the novel, it is clear that the only person keeping Tom on the outside, and alone, is himself.