Though it may seem godlessly immoral, the celebration of violence in Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad is rooted in a Calvinistic sense of sin and the vision of human freedom Highsmith discovered in Christian writers. Throughout the five novels composing her Ripliad, Tom Ripley ironically embodies the talents of Christ's primary antagonist—the Father of Lies—as Highsmith's embittered censure against the disappearance of evil as a meaningful psychological category in postwar culture.
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