The Razor’s Edge: Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

A few days later, Somerset goes to say goodbye to Elliott and Mrs. Bradley. Isabel comes into the room soon after Somerset arrives. After Somerset says goodbye, Isabel leaves with him. She says that she wants to talk to him about something. They stop at a drugstore, and Somerset orders two ice cream sodas. Isabel asks Somerset what she thinks of Larry, and Somerset tells her that he seems unusually self-possessed for a man of his age. Isabel then tells Somerset about the conversation she and Larry had the other day. 

Isabel tells Somerset that she invited Larry to her mother’s house to talk to him after he turned down Henry Maturin’s job offer. At Mrs. Bradley’s house, Isabel asked Larry why he turned down the job. Larry told her that he wanted to do something more than sell bonds for his whole life. Isabel responded that they needed to be sensible and that a man had to work. More than that, the U.S. was on the brink of becoming one of the wealthiest countries in the world; if Larry started working now, he would soon be rich. “Money just doesn’t happen to interest me,” Larry said. There was a pause in the conversation, and then Larry said, “The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.” He told Isabel that he got a lot of ideas like that while flying in the war, strange, incoherent ideas.

Larry then told Isabel that his best friend in the air corps died while he was trying to save Larry’s life. “I didn’t find that easy to get over,” Larry said. He didn’t think he’d be able to find peace until he figured out the answers to the questions he’d been asking. He said that sometimes he wondered whether it would be better to just follow the beaten path but then he thought of seeing someone lying dead who had been full of life just moments before, and it made the world seem cruel and without purpose. Isabel told him that she didn’t see a place for her in his life then. They both decided it would be good for Larry to go away. Larry then said he would travel to Paris. He might stay for a year, he said, or maybe two.

Isabel seems shaken when she finishes describing the conversation to Somerset. When she asks, Somerset says that surely she’s done the right thing and that she’s acted with love and understanding. Isabel hopes that new surroundings in Paris will shake Larry out of what Dr. Nelson has called “delayed shock.” Somerset says that maybe what happened during the war has left Larry unsatisfied and restless in a way that he doesn’t know how to address. Isabel says she thinks that something is troubling Larry. Before the war, she says, Larry had been full of zest and life, and she doesn’t understand what happened to change him. Somerset writes that, as far as he knows, Larry never told anyone about a specific, horrific event that inalterably changed him.

Somerset writes that Larry did, however, tell someone about the friend who died trying to save his life. Years later, Somerset heard that story. The friend was an Irishman with red hair who they called Patsy. Patsy was a little older than Larry and took Larry under his wing during the war. Patsy loved to fly and get into dogfights. One day, Larry and Patsy came upon German planes without expecting to. One of the planes followed Larry. Patsy dove down to shoot the plane, which veered off. Patsy made it back to the base first. When Larry arrived, Patsy was lying on the ground. “Well, I’m jiggered,” he said to Larry and then died. The day after Somerset’s conversation with Isabel, he leaves Chicago for San Francisco, where he’s scheduled to board a ship bound for China.