Previous
Part 6, Chapter 2
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
One night when Somerset is at a play, someone taps him on the shoulder. When he turns around he sees Larry, who he hasn’t seen in over a year. The two decide to get dinner. At dinner, Larry tells Somerset how he discovered that he could help heal people not only of pain but of fear as well. Larry says a yogi had performed a similar act on him when he suffered from insomnia. Later, while hiking, one of Larry’s companions hurt his ankle. Larry tried the same thing the yogi did for him on his friend and was surprised when it worked. Larry explains to Somerset that it’s simply a matter of “putting an idea into the sufferer’s mind.” When they got off the mountain, Larry’s friend brought other people to see what Larry could do, and Larry began healing people of their pain and fears.
Larry describes here how he developed his “healing” powers, which seem to be related to hypnotism. Again, it seems worth noting here that Somerset Maugham (the author, not the narrator) saw a hypnotist to try and help him manage a stutter that he had been bullied over in childhood and that seemed to become especially difficult to manage during public speaking engagements as an adult. While Larry seems skeptical of his own healing abilities, the novel seems to present those abilities as evidence of Larry’s spiritual aptitude and power.
Themes
Larry then tells Somerset how he ended up going to India after Germany. When Larry arrives in Bonn after leaving Kosti, he finds a room in the house of a widow who was once married to a university professor. His fellow boarder is a Benedictine monk, Father Ensheim, on leave from the monastery to do research in the university library. The monk used to teach philosophy, and he and Larry discuss different thinkers and schools of thought. At one point, Father Ensheim asks if Larry believes in God. Larry says he began to think about God during the war when he wondered why evil exists. Father Ensheim invites Larry to study in the library of his monastery. He says Larry is separated from faith by a barrier as thin as a piece of paper.
Larry reiterates that the problem of evil provided the initial impulse that led him to seek answers to life’s most persistent and difficult questions. At this point, Larry still seems to be grasping not just for answers to those questions but for an approach that will lead him in the right direction. Father Ensheim appears at just the right time, then, to give Larry another avenue to go down after Larry seems to have become disenchanted with the knowledge he has been able to gain through books alone.
Themes
Larry stays at the monastery for three months, during which he is very happy. But he can never quite understand the monks’ justifications for the existence of evil. They say that God creates trials for people so that by overcoming wickedness and resisting temptation, they can come to be worthy of God’s grace. Larry says that seems like creating an obstacle course for someone trying to deliver a letter just to make it harder for them to reach their destination. Larry says he doesn’t believe in an all-wise God who doesn’t have common sense. Larry decides to leave the monastery. When he leaves, Father Ensheim tells Larry that he’s a deeply religious person who doesn’t believe in God, but God will seek him out.
Larry leaves the monastery after he becomes disillusioned with the monks’ approach to the problem of evil. Their interpretation posits a God who has created obstacles, in the form of evil and suffering, as a kind of trial by fire; if someone can pass that trial, they’ll be rewarded by grace. Larry seems to criticize that approach as paternalistic. Father Ensheim’s parting comment to Larry then foreshadows events that will come later in Larry’s conversation with Somerset, in which God may seem to seek out Larry.
Themes
