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Chapter 15
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Talented Mr. Ripley, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Obsession, Identity, and Imitation
Wealth, Luxury, and Excess
Appearance vs. Reality
Escapes
Summary
Analysis
After dark, in a “precisely calculated state of intoxication,” Tom drags Freddie down to his car. A man asks in Italian if everything is all right, but Tom’s plan has worked—it appears as if he and Freddie are simply stumbling after a drunken night. Tom puts Freddie into the car and drives him down the Via Appia, eventually arriving at a cemetery. He leaves Freddie behind a tombstone, and drives back toward Rome. He wipes his fingerprints from the car and, once in Rome, parks Freddie’s car across from a nightclub, then steals Freddie’s money and drops his wallet down a sewer grate. Tom walks quickly home “as if he were fleeing a sick, passionate pursuer.”
It is at this point in the novel that Tom’s machinations and cover-ups begin their descent into an almost farcical complexity. With so much to disguise, Tom must constantly be watchful and inventive, and his fleeing a “sick, passionate pursuer” at this chapter’s end represents his own realization that his game is growing more and more complicated. Tom does not feel remorse, exactly, but a sense of unease is surely beginning to overtake him.
Themes
