The End of the Affair follows Bendrix and Sarah as they begin an extramarital affair in the early days of World War II. Bendrix is a single writer, while Sarah is married to a simple, honest man named Henry, who loves and trusts his wife wholeheartedly—even though it’s revealed that she has actually had multiple affairs throughout their marriage. The relationship between Bendrix and Sarah ends when Bendrix is knocked unconscious during an air raid in June 1944. Sarah finds him and, believing him dead, makes a deal with God that she will leave Bendrix if God will let him live, revealing her own hidden belief that their adulterous relationship—characterized by lies and deceit—is wrong. Sarah hopes God will reward her willingness to live more honestly and leave Bendrix by bringing Bendrix back to life. In fact, both Sarah and Bendrix reveal a desire for the truth about their affair to be known, revealing deep signs of remorse even though they are unwilling to be upfront and tell Henry about their relationship. Over the course of the book, Greene argues that the most powerful force in human nature is the desire to live honestly, a desire which can overcome even the most intense romantic affairs.
Initially, both Bendrix and Sarah seem untroubled by lying to Henry, who is blissfully ignorant of the reality of their friendship. Bendrix says that Sarah “had a wonderful way of eliminating remorse,” meaning she simply does not feel bad or experience any regret that she’s lying to her loving husband. Bendrix writes that within a day of beginning his affair with Sarah, Henry became “an enemy, to be mocked and resented.” By mocking Henry, Bendrix is able to convince himself that Henry deserves to be lied to, which helps justify the fact that he and Sarah are deceiving him by having an affair right under his nose.
However, the knowledge that they are in an adulterous relationship taints Bendrix and Sarah’s potential for happiness, as they both long for a relationship marked by honesty and openness. Bendrix seeks out honesty by trying to make Sarah “say more than the truth” in the form of promises that their relationship will last forever, even though they both know she won’t leave Henry. Bendrix admits to doing this just “to give [himself] the satisfaction of rejecting” these promises as lies. This is an example of Bendrix manipulating Sarah (tricking her into making false promises) to make her out to be a liar and himself to be honest, as he would reject Sarah’s false promises and remind her of the truth that their relationship won’t last forever.
After the end of their affair, Sarah’s diary reveals her desire to tell Henry about the relationship. At one point, Sarah writes, she had to fight the impulse to tell Henry’s coworker about finding Bendrix injured during an air raid—and that she was naked when she found him, because they “had been making love all evening.” For Sarah, however, being honest about her relationship with Bendrix would mean hurting Henry (whom she has an “enormous loyalty” to), which outweighs the benefits of getting divorced and starting over with Bendrix. Furthermore, Bendrix claims that he “should have been overjoyed” if Henry found out about their affair while he and Sarah were together because “one gets so hopelessly tired of deception.” Bendrix sees being honest with Henry as a means of making his relationship with Sarah morally legitimate because then they would no longer need to lie about it.
In the end, Sarah and Bendrix do come clean about their relationship—but after centering their relationship around lies and deceit for so long, they find that they can no longer have an honest relationship with each other. Sarah, although unhappy, is sustained by the thought that she is doing the right thing by keeping her promise to God to end her relationship with Bendrix forever, but Bendrix lashes out and tries to find ways to punish both of them. When Bendrix brings Henry what he believes is evidence that Sarah is having an affair with someone else, he also admits that he and Sarah had had an affair. Perturbed by Henry’s lack of apparent anger at this revelation, Bendrix feels the “poison […] beginning to work in [him] again” and hurls insults at Henry before finally asking, “Why don’t you get angry, Henry?” Bendrix clearly wants Henry to get worked up; Henry’s anger would, in Bendrix’s mind, lead to some sort of punishment that would formally put an end to Bendrix’s need to be dishonest with Henry and thus give him a clean slate. Later, Bendrix continues to say wild things to make people angry at him for his affair. After Sarah’s death, Bendrix has an outburst at both Henry and Father Crompton, a Catholic priest who comes to visit, calling Sarah a “tart” and blaming Crompton and God for “[taking] her away from all of us.” This is meant to start a fight and reveals a continued desire for someone to blame and punish him for his role in Sarah’s fate.
Sarah, on the other hand, makes it clear that her desire to live honestly and love openly trumps her desire to reignite her relationship with Bendrix. In her final letter to him, she tells him that he “taught [her] to want the truth,” meaning he taught her to want an honest relationship, which is not something she can have with him because of her marriage vows and fierce desire not to hurt Henry by leaving him. For this reason, Sarah refuses to reignite her relationship with Bendrix even though she continues to love him.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Adultery, Deception, and Honesty ThemeTracker
Adultery, Deception, and Honesty Quotes in The End of the Affair
The fool, I thought, the fool to see nothing strange in a year and a half’s interval. Less than five hundred yards of flat grass separated our two ‘sides’. Had it never occurred to him to say to Sarah, ‘How’s Bendrix doing? What about asking Bendrix in?’ and hadn’t her replies ever seemed to him… odd, evasive, suspicious? I had fallen out of their sight as completely as a stone in a pond. I suppose the ripples may have disturbed Sarah for a week, a month, but Henry’s blinkers were firmly tied. I had hated his blinkers even when I had benefited from them, knowing that others could benefit too.
She had often disconcerted me with the truth. In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth—that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry. I wouldn’t have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself. But she never played that game of make-believe […].
When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end. […] As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy—I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. […] But I suppose there are different kinds of desire. My desire now was nearer hatred than love, and Henry I had reason to believe, from what Sarah once told me, had long ceased to feel any physical desire for her. And yet, I think, in those days he was as jealous as I was. His desire was simply for companionship: he felt for the first time excluded from Sarah’s confidence: he was worried and despairing—he didn’t know what was going on or what was going to happen. He was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing. I could have no more than I had lost, while he still owned her presence at the table, the sound of her feet on the stairs, the opening and closing of doors, the kiss on the cheek—I doubt if there was much else now, but what a lot to a starving man is just that much.
‘Do you mind?’ I asked her, and she shook her head. I didn’t really know what I meant—I think I had an idea that the sight of Henry might have roused remorse, but she had a wonderful way of eliminating remorse. Unlike the rest of us she was unhaunted by guilt. In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act. She would have thought it unreasonable of Henry, if he had caught us, to be angry for more than a moment.
I am a jealous man—it seems stupid to write these words in what is, I suppose, a long record of jealousy, jealousy of Henry, jealousy of Sarah and jealousy of that other whom Mr. Parkis was so maladroitly pursuing. Now that all this belongs to the past, I feel my jealousy of Henry only when memories become particularly vivid (because I swear that if we had been married, with her loyalty and my desire, we could have been happy for a lifetime), but there still remains jealousy of my rival—a melodramatic word painfully inadequate to express the unbearable complacency, confidence, and success he always enjoys. Sometimes I think he wouldn’t even recognize me as part of the picture, and I feel an enormous desire to draw attention to myself, to shout in his ear, ‘You can’t ignore me. Here I am. Whatever happened later, Sarah loved me then.’
I was jealous even of the past, of which she spoke to me frankly as it came up—the affairs meant nothing at all (except possibly the unconscious desire to find that final spasm Henry had so woefully failed to evoke). […] There was a time when she would laugh at my anger, simply refusing to believe that it was genuine, just as she refused to believe in her own beauty, and I would be just as angry because she refused to be jealous of my past or my possible future. I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
A vow’s not all that important—a vow to somebody I’ve never known, to somebody I don’t really believe in. Nobody will know that I’ve broken a vow, except me and Him—and He doesn’t exist, does he? He can’t exist. You can’t have a merciful God and this despair.
But was it me he loved, or You? For he hated in me the things You hate. He was on Your side all the time without knowing it. You willed our separation, but he willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. 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. For either of us. I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace—he needs it more.
I wanted her burnt up, I wanted to be able to say, Resurrect that body if you can. My jealousy had not finished, like Henry’s, with her death. It was as if she were alive still, in the company of a lover she had preferred to me. How I wished I could send Parkis after her to interrupt their eternity.
‘[…] I know when a man’s in pain.’
I couldn’t get through the tough skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, ‘You’re wrong, father. This isn’t anything subtle like pain. I’m not in pain, I’m in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.’
