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Summary: While literary critics acknowledge the amoral and criminal behavior of Thomas Ripley, the antihero in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripliad series, many critics fail to recognize Highsmith’s parables in connection to ethical responsibility to the Other and guilt because of falling into complete despair. By examining Ripley’s character through an ethical lens, I contend that Ripley’s inability to connect with others disallows him from engaging in moral behavior that would establish basic responsibility for others. This results in a repetitive cycle of criminality that leads to inner turmoil and a sickness of the spirit. This thesis analyzes the parables in Highsmith’s novels by applying Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics in relation with Soren Kierkegaard’s conception of human existence. Ripley lives a lonely existence because he is unaware of his ethical dilemma, covets wealth at all costs, and fails to recognize that his division from society is at the root of his infinite despair., 2021, Includes bibliography., Degree granted: Thesis (MA)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021., Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

By examining Jim Thompson’s novels, published between 1952-1955–The Killer Inside Me, A Hell of a Woman, After Dark, My Sweet, and Savage Night–this essay interrogates the relationship created between the narrator and the reader, how the narrator–and Thompson in turn–highlights certain societal flaws, emphasizing how ethical consequence is born out of the attempt to attain freedom from one’s cultural circumstance–both in terms of economic restraint and mental health status. Through this, Thompson implies that the reader is trapped in similar economic and ethical predispositions. The reader is often left questioning what they might have done, or been able to do, in similar circumstances. This creates a larger frame by which Thompson implies that the reader is trapped in similar economic and ethical pre-dispositions as his narrators. He highlights societal flaws, demonstrating how the pursuit of freedom of one’s cultural circumstance bears ethical consequence., 2018, Includes bibliography., Degree granted: Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018., Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Summary: Although the preponderance of modern criticism about The Power and the Glory focuses only on religious themes and concerns, the formal narrative technique of Graham Greene deserves equal consideration. Greene very deliberately and consistently constructs a narrative that uses specific formal devices and linguistic techniques that further enhance a formal rhetorical study of the novel and that augment a thematic analysis of the novel. Greene's formal techniques include shifts in narrative point of view, precise forms of language, changing levels of diction, and specific grammatical devices. By analyzing the narrative techniques and linguistic markers that Greene employs, in conjunction with a theme-based analysis, we achieve great insight into the overall picture of the novel and the state of mind of the characters, particularly the protagonist of the novel, the whiskey priest., Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection, Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2000.

I argue that Merrill's epic trilogy depicts his private struggle with what is figured at various points as heredity, the unconscious, and necessity. I begin my introductory chapter by asserting that Merrill's epic is first and foremost a private quest--what he refers to in an early poem as the "inner adventure"--and not the prophetic and apocalyptic document that many have claimed it to be. I then briefly trace Merrill's influences in the creation of his epic., In my second chapter I contend that the poet's unhappiness with the user/used relationship between art and life leads him to "project" his Oedipal struggle into the fictional form of a novel. The poet's unconsciously willed loss or abandonment of this novel proves to him that any artistic effort to choose necessity and placate heredity must take the form of the quest for the sublime (depicted in "The Book of Ephraim") in which the real and the ideal, life and art, become one., In my third chapter I argue that Mirabell's Books of Number, the trilogy's second volume, is written in reaction to the failure of the poet-quester of "The Book of Ephraim" to "break out" of or to transcend the repetitive cycle of the sublime quest. In Mirabell the ouija board spirits warn the poet-quester of the dangers of continual rebellion against the natural order; they urge him to accept the limitations of his time-bound and body-bound nature., My concluding chapter concerns itself with the third book of Merrill's epic, the supposed Paradiso of this trilogy, in which the poet-quester proceeds not to beatitude but back to life. This is the most elaborate of the three poems, but its legions of ouija board figures, startling mythical histories, and endless wordplay simply serve to emphasize how little faith the poet has invested in his own celestial system., Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-06, Section: A, page: 2147., Chairperson: Naomi Lebowitz., Thesis (Ph.D.)--Washington University in St. Louis, 1993.