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Part 1, Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Razor’s Edge, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Wisdom and the Meaning of Life
Social Norms and Conformity
Trauma and Self-Destruction
Snobbishness, Social Status, and Cosmopolitanism
Truth and the Problem of Evil
Summary
Analysis
In 1919, Somerset stops in Chicago for a few weeks as he travels, ultimately, to China. Somerset has just released a book and has scheduled interviews for his time there. One morning, Elliott Templeton calls and invites Somerset to lunch with him and his sister. Somerset has known Elliott for 15 years. Though the two are friends, Somerset describes Elliott as a “colossal snob.” Elliott lives primarily in Paris and is well-connected there. He knows all of the right people and is a good person to invite to a party, never failing to entertain guests.
Snobbishness is one of Elliott’s defining characteristics. That quality puts Elliott in stark contrast to the novel’s protagonist, Larry, and also to Somerset himself; in place of snobbishness, Somerset practices cosmopolitanism, meaning that he chooses to associate with people of all social backgrounds regardless of what kind of connections they may or may not have to power and authority.
Themes
Less charitable people, Somerset says, might say that Elliott is a “dealer”; Elliott has indeed put well-to-do families who have hit a rough spot financially in contact with museum directors who are looking for some piece of artwork or another. Elliott might very well profit from those transactions, but one knows better than to ask those kinds of intrusive questions, Somerset says. While he is a snob, Elliott is also remarkably generous. People say he comes from a poor family, and if that’s true, Somerset thinks, then Elliott has certainly made a name and fortune for himself. Since Elliott has enough money to live comfortably at this point, he now devotes his life to his true passion: “social relationships.”
The novel distinguishes between people who find wealth from work and people who have high socioeconomic status without having to work. Another way of stating that distinction would be to use the difference between “old money” and “new money.” Elliott desperately wants to be perceived as a member of an aristocratic elite—in other words, as “old money.” From Elliott’s perspective, it would be pejorative, then, if people were to say that he had been a “dealer,” meaning an art dealer, which would point to the fact that he once had to work to secure a fortune and hadn’t been born into wealth that goes back generations.
Themes
