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Part 1, Chapter 5
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
Somerset returns to Mrs. Bradley’s house for dinner the next night. Most of the people at the dinner are Isabel’s friends, and Somerset forgets their names almost as soon as they’re introduced. After a while, the conversation at dinner turns to the topic of Larry’s lack of desire to find a job. Somerset thinks it’s a conversation that would make more sense to have in private and feels like he’s intruding by listening. Larry’s guardian, Dr. Nelson, says he’s never had much control over Larry, even when Larry was a child. Dr. Nelson says that when Larry is pressed for a reason as to why he declines job offers, Larry only says that the work isn’t appealing to him.
This passage shows again that Larry is intent on following his own path based on his ideas, values, and beliefs rather than following the path that society expects him to. This passage clarifies who sets those social expectations for Larry, too. In this case, the broad and potentially abstract idea of “society” or of social norms and expectations is represented by Larry’s peers, his guardian, and relatives of his fiancée, making the forces that Larry resists in following his path more concrete.
Themes
Dr. Nelson says that Larry won’t talk about the war with anyone, and he thinks the war transformed Larry. He came back with a different personality, Dr. Nelson says. Elliott, Dr. Nelson, and Mrs. Bradley all agree that if Larry is going to marry Isabel, he has to find work. They also tell Somerset that while Larry was in the war, another boy, Gray Maturin, asked Isabel to marry him. Once Larry came back, Isabel turned Gray down. Dr. Nelson, Elliott, and Mrs. Bradley all agree, though, that Gray has a bright future ahead of him, while it seems that Larry won’t amount to anything. As Somerset is leaving, Elliott invites him to lunch with Gray Maturin and his father. Somerset doesn’t know why.
Dr. Nelson introduces the idea that something happened in the war that changed Larry, though he doesn’t fully explain what that might mean. It’s worth noting that today PTSD is a well-known diagnosis related to military trauma, but that diagnosis only came into widespread usage in 1980 with the publication of DSM-III. (The DSM is the book of the official criteria used for psychological diagnoses.) At the time of the novel, in 1919, Larry’s condition might have been called “shell shock,” and it’s important to bear in mind that while trauma-induced issues spurred by war might have been common, the issue itself was not fully understood or studied at the time.
Themes
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