The Talented Mr. Ripley: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

On the ship, Tom begins to play the “role of a serious young man with a serious job ahead of him.” He does not attempt to socialize with the other passengers, and instead he hones his identity as “a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps.” Tom is excited to start a new life, and he envisions, even if his mission to bring Dickie home fails, staying on in Europe.

Tom writes letters to the Greenleafs, amusing himself by adding imagined accounts of Dickie’s life in Europe. He does not send these fanciful letters, which are full of somewhat lurid observations of Marge and Dickie’s relationship. He writes and sends a letter to his Aunt Dottie, “cutting himself off from her.” He is eager for distance from her snide letters, pitiful checks, and reminders of how cruel she was to him as a child—calling him a “sissy” and a burden.

Tom ruminates on the mistakes he’s made in the last few years in New York—never sticking to anything, stealing when he felt “the world owed him”— but he delights in his new identity as a mysterious and lonely figure on the ship, the subject of excited “speculation” from other passengers. He thinks the others must think that he has something “important on his mind,” and he decides that, in fact, he does: “the present and future of Tom Ripley.”