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Part 1, Chapter 8
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
That night, Somerset goes to dinner at the Maturins’ house, a great stone building that seems like a cross between a medieval castle and Swiss chalet. At dinner, Somerset tells Isabel that he saw Larry in the library the other day, reading William James’s The Principles of Psychology. Somerset says he saw him first at 10 in the morning, then after lunch, and then before dinner. It didn’t seem like he had moved for the better part of 10 hours and had been reading for the whole time. Somerset can’t be sure, but he thinks that when he tells that to Isabel, she seems both confused and relieved.
Isabel’s look of confusion and relief gives insight into her relationship with Larry and the dynamic between the two. Evidently, Larry isn’t keen to share the details of his life, including his plan of study, with his fiancée, Isabel, showing the degree of privacy Larry cultivates as well as the potentially harmful effects of that privacy on the people closest to him.
Themes
