Conclusion
Patricia Highsmith’s anti-hero Tom Ripley, who first appears in her 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, is made the focal point of this concluding chapter. Among Ripley’s more obvious talents is his ability to impersonate others, this being pursued to an extreme degree as he murders, and then takes on the identity of, his friend Dickie Greenleaf. Analysing Ripley’s imposture of Dickie through the lens of performativity theory (Austin and Derrida), this chapter demonstrates why this is an apt way of reflecting upon the previous chapters of the book for three reasons. Firstly, rather than focusing solely upon identifications as constative utterances which verify a pre-existing identity, this book has interpreted them as modes which perform identities in specific ways. Secondly, these performances are deeply connected to the precise form of an identification technique but are also determined by the contexts in which techniques arise and individual identifications take place. Thirdly, the book concludes by emphasising how it is the performativity of narrative prose which is at the heart of the connections traced in the preceding pages. Literature performs identities that reflect but also project and imagine what identity is and could be: subjectivity is not represented in literature, it is constituted by its forms. In this sense, the importance of literature to this project is the fact that it is only in its realm that the truly performative nature of identificatory methods can be seen.