Patricia Highsmith’s Kierkegaardian Fiction

This essay employs the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard to examine the critically neglected short fiction of Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith’s well-known dystopian thriller novels seem to express and endorse a nihilistic worldview. But when we read her more argumentatively explicit short fiction through the lens of the existentialist Kierkegaardian philosophy that she knew and admired, we see revealed in Highsmith’s work an ethical earnestness and vision that may be traced through all of her best fiction. The essay posits a manner of reading Highsmith’s fiction as allegorical ethical parable, which transforms our understanding of her work in general.