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 remembers that when his affair with Sarah ended, she told him: “Love doesn’t end.” Bendrix didn’t realize it at the time, but Sarah had made up her mind to leave him already. Sarah told him that a lot of people went their whole lives loving God without seeing him, which Bendrix now considers his first clue that Sarah was “under a stranger’s influence.” Sarah told Bendrix not to be scared and, even then, he knew that she wasn’t just talking about the danger all over London. Bendrix writes that this was the first night of the V1 air raids in London in June 1944. Even though Bendrix and Sarah could hear explosions, they didn’t worry about the bombs until after they were finished having sex.
To Bendrix, it’s far more believable that Sarah would have started to believe in God because she was in love with a man who believed in God than that she might have developed her own belief in God. Bendrix’s assumption also indicates that he had an earthly rival, someone he could target and physically or emotionally punish for seducing Sarah away from him.
Themes
Bendrix told Sarah he was going to see if anyone was in the bomb shelter in his building. As Bendrix walked down the stairs, he heard a V1 approach and then, suddenly, his mind was totally clear for a moment. When he came to, Bendrix found that he was lying under a door and missing two of his teeth but was otherwise uninjured. Bendrix walked back to his room and saw Sarah crouched on the floor. As soon as Sarah saw Bendrix come in, she jumped up and told him that she had to go, but first she stopped to help him clean his face. She told him that she had been praying after seeing him under the door—she was sure he was dead. Once Bendrix was cleaned up, Sarah left, and he didn’t see or hear from her again for two years.
Bendrix earlier criticized Henry for having “blinkers” and not seeing the evidence of Sarah’s affairs even when they happened right under his nose, but this instance shows that Bendrix had blinkers, too: he made no connection between his miraculous brush with death and Sarah’s prayers. For Bendrix, God is so definitely unreal that no amount of praying on Sarah’s part could have helped him, and his survival was just a coincidence.
Themes
