Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The End of the Affair, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Hatred
Faith, Acceptance, and the Divine
Jealousy and Passion
Adultery, Deception, and Honesty
Summary
Analysis
Bendrix reflects on the similarities between his profession as a novelist and Mr. Savage’s, including the fact that they both gather potentially meaningless details as part of the process of creating a finished product. This makes Bendrix wonder if, as he thinks back to the night when he met Sarah, he can “detect […] her future lover.” Bendrix says he “noticed Sarah […] because she was happy,” unlike so many people in the summer of 1939. Furthermore, she was beautiful, engaging, and had told him that she’d read his books without making a fuss over his career. However, Bendrix says he didn’t think he’d fall in love with her because she was beautiful, and beautiful women make him feel inferior. According to Bendrix, he has a hard time feeling sexual desire for a woman without feeling either mentally or physically superior to her.
Bendrix reveals something very important about himself and the nature of his jealousy in this passage: even before beginning his relationship with Sarah, he felt insecure about himself when he was with her. This means that in their relationship, whether she recognized it or not, Sarah had the upper hand. Without his usual sense of superiority, Bendrix became insecure and felt that he needed Sarah more than she needed him. This made him jealous and his jealousy helped propel their relationship toward its tragic end.
Themes
Bendrix reminisces about walking out of the party where he met Sarah and onto the Common with Henry, whom Bendrix had met at another party the week before. Bendrix says he had an liked Henry a lot as they talked on the Common. Bendrix told him that Sarah was “charming,” and Henry noted that she was “a great help” to him. In the present, Bendrix thinks to himself, “Poor Henry,” but then wonders why he’d consider Henry “poor” when, in the end, Henry proved to have the “winning cards” of “gentleness, humility, and trust.”
Bendrix says that Henry has the “winning cards.” The word “winning” implies that there was some sort of competition going on between them, apparently for Sarah. Bendrix also reveals that he realizes that trust played a big part in why Henry “won” in the end. Because he was jealous, Bendrix was unable to trust. Bendrix’s inability to trust Sarah made them both miserable and drove him to do cruel things to both Sarah and Henry, even after the affair was over.
Themes
Once again thinking of the party, Bendrix remembers walking back into the house with Henry and thinking he saw Sarah and another man “separating as though from a kiss,” but he noticed that Henry hadn’t seen it. However, as Henry learns later, the man was not a lover, but a colleague of Henry’s.
When Bendrix saw what seemed like a kiss, it opened up to him the possibility that Sarah was willing to cheat on her husband. Later, this adds fuel to his jealousy and makes him bitter about all the affairs Sarah had over the course of her marriage.
Themes
In the present, Bendrix writes that he would have preferred not to think about these past events, because writing about them seems to bring all of his hatred back. Bendrix observes that “Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love,” and both result in many of the same actions.
Bendrix’s observation about the close relationship between hatred and love explains more about his jealousy. If jealousy is, as Mr. Savage told Bendrix earlier, the mark of true love, then jealousy would also be the mark of true hatred.
Themes
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