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Part 6, Chapter 7
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
Larry travels to Travancore to study in the ashram of Shri Ganesha. At the ashram, Larry reads and meditates. He finds Shri Ganesha’s saintliness extraordinary. When he has spent two years at the ashram, Larry goes to a cabin in the mountains owned by the forest service. Larry wants to spend his birthday there. While there, he experiences a moment of rapture in which everything that once confused him becomes clear. He says he doesn’t want to think of the moment as one of ultimate illumination, but that he is overwhelmed by his sense of the moment’s reality. He thinks it’s the same kind of experience that mystics have had across the globe throughout time.
Larry seemed to hit a dead end earlier in the novel in his quest for spiritual insight when he relied predominantly on books for knowledge. At the ashram, he begins meditating, an approach that enables him to get closer to, and then achieve, spiritual insight through an experiential practice rather than strictly through intellectual reasoning. The novel contends, then, that spiritual insight exists in a category separate from intellectual knowledge and that spiritual insight cannot be achieved through intellectual reasoning alone.
Themes
Larry tells Somerset he still feels the sense of peace and joy he felt during that moment of rapture and that the vision of the world’s beauty he had then remains with him now. After his experience of ecstasy, Larry leaves the ashram. A week later, he arrives in Marseilles. Somerset says that Larry initially began his study to try and find a solution to the “problem of evil.” Larry says the best answer he’s arrived at is that evil is naturally, and inevitably, correlated with good; you can’t have one without the other. Larry says he doesn’t find the idea altogether satisfying, though.
Notably, though a significant amount of time has passed, Larry still feels the peace, joy, and calm that the moment of spiritual insight gave him. The lasting nature of those feelings shows one of the main differences between Larry’s pursuit of meaning and Elliott and Isabel’s pursuits of social status and wealth, respectively, and the novel argues that pursuing spiritual insight is more meaningful than status or wealth in part because the reward is not fleeting or subject to the whims of markets or trends.
Themes
In Paris, Larry tells Somerset that he now plans to return to the U.S. to live and work as a mechanic. He plans to give up the income he has received over all of these years. He thinks that in the U.S. he can be a model to show people that money isn’t the highest good; instead, Larry says, people should aim for “self-perfection.” He says that once he’s had his fill of being a mechanic, he plans to become a truck driver so he can travel. After that, he wants to drive a taxi in New York City, so he can have access to the city’s libraries. Somerset and Larry have spoken all night, and the café is now serving breakfast. Larry says he also plans to write a book, which some friends will publish with a small press in Paris.
In this passage, Larry makes it clear that he aims to, essentially, put his money where his mouth is. While he has repeatedly said that money holds no value for him, throughout the novel his inheritance has also enabled him to pursue spiritual insight without much concern for money. Now that he has found what he’s been looking for, Larry is willing to disavow that income. Larry’s statements that people in the U.S. view money as the highest good also serve as an implicit critique of capitalism and the values engendered by that economic system, values that Larry hopes to counteract by, it seems, modeling what spiritual insight looks like.
Themes
