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Part 2, Chapter 6
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 sees little of Mrs. Bradley, Elliott, and Isabel over the next four weeks when they’re in London, but he does go to one or two of Elliott’s parties. At one of those parties, Isabel pulls him aside to talk about Larry. Isabel tells Somerset about the conversation she and Larry had when they broke off their engagement. She says that Larry mentioned someone named Ruysdael. Somerset asks if it might have been Ruysbroek. Isabel says maybe. Ruysbroek was a 14th-century Flemish mystic, and Somerset thinks that the name might be a clue to the direction Larry’s thinking is headed. Isabel wonders why Larry would have turned out like this. Before the war, she says, he had been a normal boy, similar to everyone else. She tells Somerset that she doesn’t want to see him make a mess of his life.
When Somerset hears that Larry is interested in the 14th-century Flemish mystic Ruysbroek, he believes he might have a sense of where Larry’s pursuit of insight is headed. Somerset’s circumspection about the direction of Larry’s course of study hints that Larry’s journey toward meaning is anything but straightforward; Larry doesn’t necessarily have a clear goal in mind but instead proceeds haltingly according to the powerful but inchoate questions that occurred to him during the war without knowing exactly where those questions will lead.
Themes
Somerset says Larry has undertaken a daunting path, but maybe in the end he’ll find what he’s looking for. Isabel asks Somerset what he thinks Larry is trying to find. Somerset says it seems like Larry is looking for God. Isabel says she feels guilty. She thinks that if she were more unselfish or more noble, she would give up everything to marry Larry. “Common sense is never very sympathetic, is it?” she asks rhetorically. Somerset asks why she won’t take the risk, and she says, “I’m afraid.” Isabel tells Somerset that before she left Paris, she had come up with a plan to get Larry to return to the U.S. and marry her once and for all.
Somerset clarifies that he thinks Larry is searching for God. In response, Isabel shows that she is clear-headed in her rejection of Larry and his lifestyle. If she married him, she thinks that while he continued on his quest for meaning, she would have to stay behind and make ends meet, in charge of “common sense” while Larry asked the big questions. Later, though, she says that fear holds her back, showing again just how much convention and conformity impact her decision to turn away from Larry, a decision that will, in one way or another, stay with her for the rest of her life.
Themes
The night before she left Paris, Isabel tells Somerset, she and Larry went out to dinner and then went out dancing. She planned to bring him back to Elliott’s house, and, once there, it would be almost “inevitable that the inevitable would happen.” Her room was far from her mother’s and Elliott’s, so she wasn’t worried about them finding out. Once she returned to Chicago, she planned to write to Larry and tell him she was pregnant. She was sure that once she got him back to Chicago, he wouldn’t leave. But when she arrived at Elliott’s house with Larry, he looked so innocent and guileless that she couldn’t go through with her plan. She says her better nature took over. Somerset tells her that the trip home might help her begin to get over Larry. Somerset plans to leave London too, headed for Tyrol.
Isabel reveals that she had a plan to sleep with Larry and then tell him that she was pregnant in a ploy to get him to return to Chicago. While Isabel doesn’t go through with her plan, the scheme itself reveals that Isabel is willing to consider acting underhandedly to get what she wants, foreshadowing a consequential underhanded decision that Isabel will make later in the novel. Notably, after Isabel reveals the plan she abandoned, Somerset says he hopes the trip home will help her get over Larry, ironically signaling just how hard of a time Isabel will have falling out of love with Larry.
Themes
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