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
On September 10, 1945 Sarah writes that while she was cleaning out an old purse, she found a business card for Richard Smythe with an address for those who wanted to visit him. Sarah writes that she wanted to “take a different medicine” and that if Richard could convince her that her promise to God was meaningless, then she would write Maurice and go back to him. At Smythe’s house, Sarah explained her vow and said though she didn’t want to believe in God, she wasn’t sure whether she did or not. Sarah asked Richard if he could “explain away love too,” so he told her that love stemmed from a number of desires—including a “biological” one—and warned her not to “confuse the thing with phantoms.” According to Richard, in Sarah’s case it was “just a question of [her] lover and [her] husband.”
Sarah went to Richard to be talked out of her belief in God so that she would finally feel free to break her vow. However, Richard makes the mistake of trying to convince Sarah that love also doesn’t exist. This is something Sarah really can’t understand, because she has felt and experienced love; if Richard is wrong about love not existing, then perhaps he is wrong about God not existing, as well.
Themes
Sarah asked Richard how she should decide what to do if love didn’t really exist. Although Richard claimed not to know for certain, he advised Sarah to choose whatever would make her happiest. To herself, Sarah thought that Richard only got happiness from feeling like he be comforting and useful to other people. As Sarah prepared to leave, Richard invited her to come back to listen to him talk for an hour each week. Sarah could see that it would make Richard happy if she agreed, so she told him that she would come back. Sarah writes that she was also “praying to the God [Richard] was supposed to cure [her] of” to let her “be of use” to Richard.
When Sarah starts praying to God immediately after her first meeting with Richard, it shows that she had already given up on the idea that Richard could talk her out of belief. Her decision to go back to him, then, is more to give Richard happiness than out of any hope that he could help her. In this, Sarah illustrates her willingness to endure discomfort to give someone else happiness. This mirrors Sarah’s unwillingness to divorce Henry—she would rather be in a passionless marriage that costs her the love of her life (Bendrix) than hurt Henry by leaving him.
Themes
On October 2, 1945 Sarah writes that she went into a church to get away from human bodies and their many needs. However, the church she walked into was a Catholic church full of statues of human bodies, which made Sarah think that she could believe in a God if it didn’t look anything like a human but was instead more like a “vapour.” Sarah found comfort in this thought because then she could become a vapour and “escape [her]self forever.” However, Sarah realized that she didn’t want Maurice’s body to become a vapour because she loved it so much. Furthermore, as Sarah looked at a “material body on a material cross,” she questioned how “the world [could] have nailed a vapour” onto the cross.
This marks a new development in Sarah’s spiritual journey. She has moved beyond considering God as just an idea to wondering what shape he might take—does he have a material body or is he just a “vapour”? When Sarah wonders how “the world [could] have nailed a vapour” onto the cross, she is also asking how anything could have been nailed onto the cross if it wasn’t real; in other words, the fact that there is a figure on the cross can be considered evidence of God’s existence.
Themes
As Sarah contemplated whether God had a material body or was just a vapour, she thought about Richard and the fact that he “hated a fable.” She thought about how Richard hated the idea of heaven (the fable equivalent of the sugar house in the story of Hansel and Gretel); Sarah hated the evil queen in Snow White, but Richard didn’t hate “his fairy-tale Devil.” Sarah wondered why Richard saved all his hatred for the good in fairy tales rather than the bad. To herself, Sarah says, “I’ve hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn’t loved him too? Oh God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean?”
Sarah arrives at an important realization—arguably one of the most important messages of the book—that hate, more often than not, is rooted in love. For example, Sarah admits that there were times that she hated Bendrix. But that hatred would never have existed if she hadn’t learned to love him first; the hatred itself was a result of frustration with the fact that his jealousy limited her freedom and prevented them from being happy together, as shown in the beginning of Sarah’s diary when she likened his jealousy to a “medieval chastity belt.” It seems, then, that Sarah may be considering hatred as a path toward love; if she could hate God, then maybe she could love him too.
Themes
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