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Part 4, Chapter 3
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
A few days later, while Isabel and Somerset are drinking tea and Gray is drinking whiskey, Larry comes to the apartment. Somerset watches Isabel and sees that she is trying to keep from crying. To Somerset, Larry seems warm and cordial but also a bit aloof. Larry wears a new set of clothes, and his hair is now cut short. He graciously turns down a cocktail and then champagne. At dinner, Larry eats very little. He says he had been in India for five years before coming back to Paris and had spent two years in the ashram of a yogi. Somerset asks what drew Larry to the yogi, and Larry says, “Saintliness.” When Somerset asks what he gained from two years at the ashram, Larry says, “Peace.” Before the end of the night, they all agree to have dinner together at a restaurant in a few days.
When Isabel sees Larry for the first time in years, she tears up, showing that she still harbors deep feelings for Larry and foreshadowing how Isabel’s feelings will ultimately manifest in ways that cause harm to others. Somerset remarks on Larry’s difference from the people he is with. He says that Larry remains aloof and that he chooses not to drink while others do, highlighting the idea that Larry, while remaining in society, seems detached from it as well. That detachment, instead of signaling disinterestedness, seems to be rooted, the novel suggests, in spiritual ideas in which detachment is understood as the path toward spiritual enlightenment.
Themes
