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Part 4, Chapter 4
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 nights later, they all meet at Isabel and Gray’s apartment before going to the restaurant. Gray says he can’t go because he has one of his debilitating headaches. Larry asks if he can try to help, and Gray says that there’s nothing he can do. Larry tells Gray to hold a coin in his closed hand while Larry counts to 20. Before he reaches 20, Larry says, the coin will fall from Gray’s hand to the floor. When Larry reaches 15, Gray’s fingers start to tremble, and at 19, the coin falls out of his hand. Gray says he didn’t choose to open his hand and the coin seemed to fall on its own. Larry repeats the exercise with Gray’s arm, raising it without Gray willing it to, and again, Gray’s arm rises as if acting on its own. Larry says he is only trying to gain Gray’s confidence.
During his quest for spiritual insight, Larry also seems to have developed healing powers. It’s worth noting that Somerset Maugham (the author) had a stutter for most of his life. He was bullied for it as a child, and it caused him stress and anxiety as an adult when he had to speak in public. He consulted a doctor, Dr. Patrick Leahy, who treated that stutter with a form of hypnotism, which Maugham said helped him significantly, although the benefits of the hypnotism, he said, were not permanent. Larry’s powers of hypnotism, though, seem to mirror, in some ways, those that Maugham (the author) encountered in his own life.
Themes
Larry then tells Gray that he’ll go to sleep for six minutes. When Gray wakes up, his headache will be gone. Gray falls asleep and then wakes up soon after with no headache. Gray asks how Larry did it, and Larry says he didn’t do anything; Gray did. After dinner, Isabel asks if he learned how to do that kind of thing in India, and Larry says yes. She asks if Larry might be able to cure Gray permanently, which would help him secure and hold down a job. Larry says he’s not sure, but maybe. Gray and Larry arrange to meet the next day to discuss it.
In this passage, the novel contends that Larry’s path toward spiritual meaning (and the skills of hypnosis he picked up along the way) might also help heal Gray of his headaches, which would help Gray be able to hold down a job again. The novel suggests that if Larry could heal Gray, such that Gray were able to find wealth again, that wealth would be based on, and indebted to, Larry’s search for spiritual meaning, highlighting the novel’s contention that Larry’s path of spiritual insight leads to a higher kind of meaning than the pursuit of wealth.
Themes
