Adapting The Talented Mr. Ripley: Narrative Configuration from Page to Screen Isabella Escalona College

Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel The Talented Mr. Ripley tells a psychologically thrilling tale of murder, obsession, and identity theft through the lens of Tom Ripley, a manipulative and disturbed young man with a gift for fraud and deceit. Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation similarly explores such concepts, presenting a creatively reimagined version of the story. Featuring a vastly different narrative configuration, the film captures the theme of identity in a more multifaceted way by portraying the enigmatic main character as more humanized than a cold-blooded murderer. Nonetheless, the film achieves a faithful adaptation of Highsmith’s original work, ultimately demonstrating the importance of analyzing narrative configuration as an element that gives purpose to both literary and cinematic stories alike.

The narrative configuration of Minghella’s adaptation differs significantly from that of Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. At the start of the novel, for example, as Tom Ripley paces the streets of New York, he senses that he is being followed and becomes afraid that he has been caught for his numerous acts of forgery. In contrast, rather than telling the story chronologically, the film begins with the final...