The two dominant themes are the need for emotional control and the inevitable pain of disillusionment.
Philip Carey, an orphan afflicted with a club foot, is excessively sensitive and shy and, as a result, reacts to life's adversities with greater than normal emotion. Only through suffering embarrassment, indignity, and pain does he finally arrive at a kind of stoic acceptance of suffering as his lot. An intensely painful love relationship causes him to question the relevance of happiness as a major purpose of life.
According to Maugham, life.....
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