The Road To Liberty:on Maugham’s Exploration Of Unshackling The Human Bondage

The British writer William Somerset Maugham is the witness of the Western literature transiting from traditional realism to modernism. Though his three novels, Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor’s Edge, Maugham, whose works are widely read and extremely enlightening, dispassionately reflects on the source and the revelation of modern man’s spiritual crisis and strives to find a harmony in the cruel reality and the way to salvation.In the20th century, man’s ideology had undertaken tremendous subversion due to three facts:the development of rationalism sowed the seed of disbeliefs in God and religion; the publication of The Origin of Species overthrew man’s self-recognition. Instead of being "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals", they realized that they were no more than civilized animals; finally, the two world wars and the economy depression shattered modern man’s dreams and illusions, thus the spiritual crisis got to its peak.Based on a comprehensive reading of the three novels, the thesis adopts psychoanalysis and Schopenhauerian pessimism to anatomize modern man’s spiritual crisis in Of Human Bondage, Camus’s absurdism in The Moon and Sixpence and Nietzsche’s overman in The Razor’s Edge, and tries to demonstrate Maugham’s ever deepening understanding of humanity and the quest for a desirable way of unshackling spiritual bondage.