The Razor's Edge (Annotated Edition)

Published in 1944 when Somerset Maugham was 70 years old, The Razor's Edge would come to be considered the last of his major works of fiction. The philosophical awareness that any man naturally arrives at by the advanced age at which Maugham produced this story of the one man's search for the meaning of life would was only heightened and intensified by Maugham's relentless curiosity about the world around him. A testament to Maugham's own search for meaning in life can be apprehended simply through the knowledge that he chose his title for this novel from the Kasha-Upanishad which was composed almost a thousand years before the birth of Christ as one of the concluding sections of the founding document of Hinduism. The tale of Larry Darrell's transformation from normal, everyday kind of a guy into a seeker of greater meaning following his exposure to the horrors of a society he never imagined before heading off to battle in World War I is one that spans decades and circle around the globe. The overarching theme is whether it is not so much nobler, but more satisfying to all involved to accept a life of comfortable materialism or search for a greater spiritual meaning no matter what the price tag. A meaningful existence for Maugham appears to be one based on some sort of spiritual guidance, though Larry seems to quickly reject Christianity as the only possible route to discovering an answer to the question of why evil exists in the world.