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 writes that he was late for Sarah’s funeral because he went to meet a literary critic named Peter Waterbury who was going to write an article about his novels. In an aside, Bendrix says he doesn’t understand why he went because he had lost interest in his work—none of it seemed to matter. Returning to the story, Bendrix writes that Waterbury was with a woman named Sylvia. Due to his long years in the publishing business, Bendrix recognizes that Sylvia is Waterbury’s protégé. To himself, Bendrix thinks he’d be able to seduce Sylvia away from Waterbury if he wanted to. Waterbury starts to ask questions about Bendrix’s opinion on the novelist E.M. Forster, but Bendrix and Sylvia exclusively talk to each other about the funeral Bendrix has to go to. Sylvia offers to show Bendrix the way to the cemetery and he accepts, leaving Waterbury to angrily call after them.
In Sylvia, Bendrix sees an opportunity to seduce a woman away from another man the same way he always feared someone would seduce Sarah away from him. Furthermore, the fact that Bendrix goes to this meeting even though he knows it will make him late to Sarah’s funeral implies that, on some level, he wants to miss the funeral—by missing the funeral, Bendrix might avoid having to deal with further undeniable evidence of the reality of Sarah’s death.
Themes
