The Moon and Sixpence

About the book

Charles Strickland leaves his established London household for Paris, where explanations based on a conventional romantic scandal prove inadequate. The narrator encounters a man driven to paint and strikingly indifferent to the comfort, affection, or approval of others. Attempts to understand him involve direct observation and accounts from people affected by his conduct, eventually extending the inquiry to Tahiti. Maugham makes the distance between artistic achievement and ordinary moral expectations central to the story. The narrator's curiosity does not remove the damage done to those who enter Strickland's orbit, and admiration remains entangled with repulsion. Rather than providing transparent access to the artist's inner life, the novel builds a portrait from incomplete encounters, asking what can be understood about a vocation whose demands its subject scarcely tries to explain.

• Artistic obsession
• Moral responsibility
• The limits of understanding

Why read it

For a provocative portrait of artistic compulsion constructed through the uncertain knowledge and conflicting responses of an observer.

Novel · English text