Maugham’s three most significant novels following Of Human Bondage explore ideals that he considered in the final chapters of his autobiography, The Summing Up—truth, beauty, goodness. Could you help me please, my teacher asked me about psychology as a branch of psychological prose and its characteristic which Maugham imbibes into his works? W. Somerset Maugham’s (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) twenty novels are exceptionally uneven; the first eight, though interesting, suggest the efforts of a young novelist to discover where his talent lies. One would naturally conclude that it cannot possibly be both and that it has to be one or the other. He is concerned chiefly with discovering the meaning of human existence and eliminating evil in the world.

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Though people are under no obligation to create a design, they are free to do so if they choose; or, if they reject freedom of the will, it may seem that they are free. Not even the narrator, however, can explain or account for it; the reader savors its presence without fully understanding its origin. Her is a tragic narrative and the tragic narrative is almost always more fascinating than the narrative of those who simply orbit around a romantic figure like Larry Darrell without full understanding or appreciating him. To express the necessity for disillusionment, Maugham depicts Philip as growing up in an atmosphere of illusion involving religious beliefs and assumptions about the code of an English gentleman. Maugham’s portrait of Larry as enigmatic stranger around whom the lives of the other characters intersect in irregular and unpredictable ways is constructed solidly upon this foundation of withheld information.The result is that he loses his religious faith, though he assumes that the actual cause of the loss is that he lacks the religious temperament. Among common readers, he was perhaps the most successful English novelist of the twentieth century, and, as Samuel Johnson pointed out, the common reader is not often wrong. Of Human Bondage is highly autobiographical, although it departs significantly from autobiographical accuracy in places.

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With characters such as the urbane and aristocratic art agent, Elliott Templeton, he exchanges views and pleasantries in an attitude of amusement and tolerance. The unflattering portrait of Walpole, recognizable to many contemporaries and to Walpole himself, contributed to an attack on Maugham by Evelyn Wiehe in Gin and Bitters (1931), where he is given the name Leverson Hurle. It is perhaps inevitable that none of the other characters rise quite to the same level of interest as Larry although Sophie comes close, but it is difficult to tell whether that is due to her actually being an interesting character or leading the most interesting life of any character other than Larry.The novels brought Maugham acclaim and recognition both from a general audience and from the intelligentsia. She confesses to Ashenden that she ran off with Lord George because “He was always such a perfect gentleman,” a judgment with which every other character in the novel would have disagreed. Somerset Maugham may not be considered one of the great literary artists to ever walk the land, but his ability to craft a story that reads exactly the way it should is almost unparalleled. Instead of spanning decades, the plots narrate events that occur during a few months; novels such as Up at the Villa, for example, differ little from some of Maugham’s short stories. Somerset Maugham, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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The Reverend William Carey and his wife Louisa are based upon Maugham’s uncle and aunt with whom he lived; Lawson is his friend Sir Gerald Kelly; Cronshaw derives from the eccentric poet Aleister Crowley, who had also been the model for Oliver Haddo in The Magician; and Hayward is based upon Maugham’s friend Ellington Brooks. In structure, however, it is much closer to a series of loosely collected short stories featuring the same cast of characters. As is typical of naturalistic fiction, the characters are generally without hope, yet even in a naturalistic tradition Maugham reveals an original perspective. A story of intrigue, assassination, and revenge, it is derived from a brief passage in a work by Niccolò Machiavelli.

Larry Darrell is the type of character that get a reader in a lot of trouble if that reader comes into contact with Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge at the wrong time.

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Maugham relies heavily on flashbacks ranging over a period of some forty years; Cakes and Ale is a novel cast in the form of reminiscences of a character, which assuredly would conflict with the “official” biography of Driffield as recorded by Alroy Kear. Significantly, in Maugham’s major novels, the important characters—Philip Carey, Larry Darrel, Rosie Gann, and Charles Strickland—either embody an ideal or achieve some measure of success in pursuit of an ideal, whereas idealism in the minor works is usually crushed and defeated. They are motivated by their passions or emotions and by their attempts to control their destinies, not by an ideology or set of ideals. Having been born with a clubfoot, which becomes a source of ridicule among school boys, and having lost both parents in childhood, he becomes overly sensitive.In fact, Maugham’s hero could be every as potentially dangerous an influence on those who are undergoing on existential mid-life crisis of shattered dreams as he is on those very young and inexperienced readers still expecting to equate their dreams of life with the actual experience of living it. The poet told him that the rug held the key to the meaning of life, but he refused to explain the puzzle to Philip. Its existence is ironic, and it might be overlooked were not the Maugham persona on hand to define it.