The Razor's Edge

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1944

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapters 1-4 Summary

Isabel and her mother arrive in Paris 18 months later. Elliott tells them that Larry has refused every invitation Elliott has extended to him. No one knows exactly where Larry lives, as his only address is an American Express office. Isabel agrees that if Larry won’t come home and get a job, she will have no choice but to break their engagement. When Isabel asks Larry when he is coming back to Chicago, he replies that he can’t give up his quest yet. He sees himself on the threshold of what he is searching for. He wants to know if God exists and, if so, why he allows evil; and whether people have immortal souls or if, when they die, they are just gone. Isabel is embarrassed by his ideas. She tells him that he is missing out on the greatest adventure the world has ever known—the rise of America. She suggests he has an obligation to do his part to advance American progress. Moreover, she says, men must work. It’s a matter of self-respect.

Larry wants Isabel to marry him right away. He says they will go to Greece on their honeymoon and live happily on his $3000 a year (approximately $65,000 in 2020). Isabel argues that she doesn’t want to live on $3000 a year. She wants to have expensive clothes and go to parties and dances. However, she says, it would be all right if he got a job that paid $3000 a year; she wouldn’t mind because she would know that it was only a matter of time before Larry made good.

In short, neither Larry nor Isabel can live the life the other wants. They break their engagement.

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary

Isabel arrives home in time for tea, finding that Elliott is hosting a little gathering of elegant ladies and gentlemen. The ladies are painted and powdered and exquisitely dressed. The gentlemen are servile and obsequious. They chatter loudly about trivialities as if they think parties and gossip and dresses are the most important things in the world. Isabel is dazzled by their clothes, their jewelry, and their sophisticated poise. These are the people she admires and the life that seems meaningful to her.

Part 2, Chapters 6-7 Summary

A fortnight or so after the breakup, Maugham receives an invitation from Elliott to come for drinks with Louisa and Isabel. Isabel takes Maugham aside and recounts to him the conversation that led to her severed engagement to Larry. Isabel wonders what happened to make Larry turn out this way. He was perfectly normal before he joined the air corps. Although she has, by every moral standard she knows, done the right thing, somehow, she feels she has a guilty conscience—as if, were she a better person, she’d have loved Larry enough to renounce the world for him. When Isabel asks whether she did the right thing, Maugham replies that she did what was right “for [her]”; Isabel doesn’t seem to notice the distinction. Maugham points out that Larry doesn’t love Isabel enough to sacrifice for her, either, but Isabel says that part of her guilt over breaking the engagement has to do with the idea that women are the ones expected to sacrifice their futures to accommodate men. Maugham offers Isabel neither criticism nor validation. He merely listens and acknowledges the validity of both views.

Isabel confesses that she had considered seducing Larry, then telling him there was going to be a baby, forcing him to come back to Chicago, marry her, and take up the life she wants. At the last minute, she couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t a conscious choice on her part; it was as if something outside herself had stopped her.

Part 2 Analysis

Larry and Isabel come no closer to finding a compromise between their two views of life. In fact, if anything, Larry is even further from Isabel’s world than before. The prospect of either one changing seems slight because there is no real fault in either of their outlooks. If one set of values were obviously bad, the reader could hope for the character to change. The life Isabel wants may be superficial, and her values are measured materialistically, but it harms no one. Larry’s pursuit of truth and meaning is high-minded, but in the wider scope of things, it may have no more impact on the world than will Isabel’s desire to live a gracious life.

Maugham does, however, state at the outset that the story will end with neither a death nor a marriage, so the reader can guess these two characters will never be able to reconcile. The reader must reorient their expectations for the characters when considering how their different ambitions will play out, or who will be rewarded for pursuing those ambitions. Both Larry and Isabel are, in their way, idealists—the difficulty is that their ideals conflict. Maugham points out that Larry doesn’t love Isabel enough to sacrifice his ambition for her. However, their positions aren’t perfectly equal: To be with Larry, Isabel would have to sacrifice one particular kind of life; Larry, to accommodate her, would have to sell his soul.

Isabel’s abandonment of her plan to trap Larry raises the question of why she stopped. Isabel possesses an iron will and seldom allows herself to be deterred. She says her change of mind felt like a force outside herself. This subtly suggests there may be something protecting Larry—perhaps his aura of goodness, or even a higher power—that she can’t violate. Isabel also has a capacity for self-deception. Possibly, she recognizes without understanding that even if she “won,” she would still never completely have him; alternatively, it may be her woman’s impulse (that is, an impulse socially conditioned into women) to sacrifice her own desire for someone else’s happiness. She sees her chance to have both Larry and the life she wants, but if it is at the expense of Larry’s happiness, she cannot take it. Only for Larry does the reader ever see her giving way in anything she really wants.