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 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 7, Chapters 1-4 Summary

Six months later, the police contact Maugham. Sophie has been murdered. Maugham and Larry go together to identify the body. As Maugham predicted the last time he saw her, Sophie’s throat was cut.

Afterward, Maugham and Larry go out for a drink. Larry has given away his money and plans to work his way across the Atlantic on a freighter. Maugham wonders if Larry’s life might have been better if he had married and had children like everybody else. Larry replies that the only woman he could ever have married was Sophie. He doesn’t seem even to remember that he was engaged to Isabel. Maugham supposes it has never occurred to Larry that Isabel still has any feelings for him.

Passing through Paris, Maugham stops to see Isabel. She and Gray are getting ready to go back to America. When Maugham relays how Sophie was murdered, Isabel is neither sorry nor surprised. Maugham tells her he believes Isabel killed her, having intentionally left Sophie alone with the bottle of vodka. Isabel admits it. She has no remorse, either. She believes she saved Larry from a terrible mistake.

Maugham tells her about Larry’s plans. She begins to cry, knowing Larry has left her social world forever and she will never see him again. When she recovers her composure, she asks Maugham if he thinks badly of her. He replies that when he really cares for someone, their wrongdoing doesn’t make him like them any less. He also observes that there is only one fault in the persona she has sculpted for herself over the years: a lack of tenderness. To tease Isabel, Maugham mentions that he has dinner plans with a friend. He describes Suzanne as one of Larry’s girlfriends. Isabel doesn’t believe him, as she is convinced that Larry is a virgin. Maugham never sees Isabel again. He imagines that she and Gray are popular, happy, and an asset to their community.

Part 7, Chapters 5-6 Summary

Maugham continues to see Suzanne from time to time until two years later when he drops in on her to find that she is getting ready to give a showing of her paintings. The wife of her lover, Monsieur Achille, has died, and he wants to marry Suzanne. They will be able to tell everyone that his new wife is a prestigious and successful artist. Suzanne might miss her freedom, but she believes she’s getting to an age where she has to think of the future. Her daughter, Odette, is 16 and has a good education, but Suzanne says Odette doesn’t have the temperament to be an actress or a “whore” and that, for women, there are no other interesting jobs besides those two. Monsieur Achille has promised to give Odette a dowry so she can marry well. According to Suzanne, marriage is still the only job that really meets a woman’s needs.

Maugham never sees or hears of Larry again. He supposes that Larry has followed through with his plan to travel America. He imagines that in his free time, Larry will write a book setting out what he’s learned from life, or maybe he will just attract seekers like himself who will absorb something of the spiritual life that Larry follows.

Stepping out of the story, Maugham realizes that he has written a success story after all. Larry has enlightenment. Elliott reached the highest tier of high society. Isabel lives the gracious life she wanted. Gray has a steady job. Suzanne has security, and Sophie got the death that Maugham supposes she wanted. Readers like a success story, so maybe, says the author, the ending is more satisfactory than he expected when he set out.

Part 7 Analysis

Larry still demonstrates his lack of understanding of others. He doesn’t acknowledge that he was ever engaged to Isabel and doesn’t imagine that she feels anything more for him than he does for her. Larry’s attachment to Isabel wasn’t enough to make him sacrifice his quest, yet he was willing to do so for Sophie. Maugham’s idea that Larry might have been better off if he had married and settled down suggests that life with someone like Sophie might have been better for Larry. However, Maugham makes this suggestion because has never been truly comfortable with Larry’s spiritual quest, even if he recognizes Larry’s exceptional nature.

While Maugham’s narration never explicitly argues for how much of Isabel’s destruction of Sophie involved jealousy and how much was genuine concern for Larry, her insistence that Larry must be a virgin suggests that she still feels possessive of him. She doesn’t want to believe that he could forget his feelings for her while she continues to be in love with him. Her attachment to him also has a controlling, condescending quality that makes her want him to remain “innocent.”

Life is complex and messy, and Maugham is too astute an observer to resort to fairytale endings. All the characters have gotten what they wanted but relinquished something else. Neither Suzanne nor Isabel are in love with the men they marry. Sophie never had the opportunity to heal from her shattering loss, and Elliott’s values were of the most superficial even in his anticipation of heaven. Larry has renounced the world: He will love everyone and be intimate with no one. None of the characters are successful exactly in the way the reader might wish, but their stories ring true because like most people, none of them achieve a perfectly balanced life. The story ends on a bittersweet note. The characters pass out of Maugham’s life, never to be seen again. It’s a little like a death, and it might suggest that none of them cared enough about Maugham to feel a pang at leaving. They moved on with their own lives and left him behind.