It's as though the pull toward faith were inevitable, if incomprehensible-perhaps as punishment for her sin of adultery. For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. Writing to God in her journal, she says: You willed our separation, but he willed it too.
Sarah herself comes to understand her move through a strange rationalization. It isn't until years later, when he hires a private detective to ascertain the truth, that he learns of her impassioned vow. The only explanation he can think of is that she's left him for another man. She breaks off the relationship without giving a reason, leaving Bendrix mystified and angry. People can love each other without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You."īendrix, as evidenced by his ability to tell the story, is not dead, merely unconscious, and so Sarah must keep her promise. I'll give him up forever, only let him be alive with a chance. "I love him and I'll do anything if you'll make him alive. Sarah rushes down to find him lying under a fallen door, and immediately makes a deal with God, whom she has never particularly cared for. Reflecting on the ebullient beginnings of their romance, Bendrix recalls: "There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom-we were together in desire." Indeed, the affair goes on unchecked for several years until, during an afternoon tryst, Bendrix goes downstairs to look for intruders in his basement and a bomb falls on the building. The lovers meet at a party thrown by Sarah's dreary civil-servant husband, and proceed to liberate each other from boredom and routine unhappiness. The affair in question involves Maurice Bendrix, a solipsistic novelist, and a dutifully married woman, Sarah Miles.
Set in London during and just after World War II, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a pathos-laden examination of a three-way collision between love of self, love of another, and love of God.
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