In The End of the Affair, Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles engage in a passionate love affair that turns toxic due to Bendrix’s intense jealousy. Sarah, on the other hand, is never jealous and struggles to understand Bendrix’s feelings as his insinuations and insults make it harder and harder for them to be happy together. Sarah, who is married to a passionless man named Henry, has had affairs before, and none of her assurances to Bendrix that she’s never loved a man like him and never will again fall on deaf ears as Bendrix’s obsession with her intensifies. Even when their relationship ends and Sarah passes away, Bendrix’s jealousy prevents him from moving on and finding a healthier and happier relationship elsewhere. Through Bendrix, Greene explores the self-destructive nature of jealousy, highlighting how it can infect even the happiest relationships.
Bendrix realized early on that Sarah had carried out affairs before, which planted the seed of jealousy in his mind. Eventually, his jealousy became their relationship’s defining characteristic, poisoning even their happiest moments. After the first time they sleep together, Sarah tells him about a stair in her house that always squeaks and mentions that it will be better if she calls Bendrix instead of him calling her house. This makes Bendrix think of “how well she knows how to conduct an affair” and marks the beginning of his jealousy and insistence that she doesn’t really love him. Bendrix himself claims that he “measured love by the extent of [his] jealousy,” meaning that the more reasons he found to be jealous, the more he was sure that he truly loved Sarah. Bendrix also describes his attempts to catch Sarah in lies, even little ones, saying, “every lie I would magnify into a betrayal,” thus making arguments and inevitability and illustrating his own awareness that he was actively trying to poison their relationship and time together.
Even after the end of their relationship, Bendrix’s jealousy and possessiveness prevent him from truly moving on and from allowing Sarah to do so as well. Two years after the end of their relationship, Bendrix runs into Henry and learns that he is concerned that Sarah is having an affair. Even though it’s been two years since Bendrix and Sarah’s relationship ended, Bendrix thinks to himself that there’s “still […] jealousy of my rival.” Jealousy over the mere idea of Sarah seeing someone else prompts Bendrix to hire a private detective to follow her around and send reports back to him. Even when he no longer has any rational claim on her affection, Bendrix is unwilling to let her be happy with anyone else. Furthermore, Bendrix claims that his “passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever” and he’s been unable to enter a new relationship. Bendrix calls his feelings for Sarah “passion” instead of “love,” implying that he knew his feelings for her were out of control and, therefore, were capable of preventing him from truly living his life or beginning a healthy relationship with anyone who didn’t inspire the same emotions in him.
Not even Sarah’s death puts and end to Bendrix’s jealousy, but rather causes him to project his resentment toward Sarah’s other partners onto God. Bendrix admits, “My jealousy had not finished […] with her death. It was as if she were alive still, in the company of a lover she had preferred to me.” His admission reveals an irrational belief that he had a right to Sarah and her body and sees her death as an act of infidelity on her part. Bendrix even targets priests, claiming the Catholic priest who comes to visit is “the victor” because he represents God and encouraged Sarah to embrace her budding faith—a faith that convinced Sarah to cut things off with Bendrix and dedicate her life to God. Bendrix’s contempt for the priest suggests that Bendrix viewed possessing Sarah as a kind of competition, framing her body and affection as a prize to be won and thus stripping her of much of her humanity. After learning of Sarah’s spiritual journey, Bendrix says God “was as underhand as a lover,” showing that, even as his own religious belief begins to take root, he still sees God as an enemy that has wronged him. This attitude, steeped in competition, prevents Bendrix from developing a healthy spirituality that may have brought him comfort and helped him move on.
Bendrix’s uncontrollable jealousy destroys everything in its path, including his own chances for happiness. In the end, Bendrix discovers that he has become afraid of love, making himself the final victim of his own irrationality and illustrating how the damaging effects of jealousy can destroy a person’s happiness from the inside out.
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Jealousy and Passion Quotes in The End of the Affair
If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry—I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate.
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 […].
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.
‘You’d make my bed for me?’
‘Perhaps.’
Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor. Even before the days of Mr. Parkis I was trying to check on her: I would catch her out in small lies, evasions that meant nothing except her fear of me. For every lie I would magnify into a betrayal, and even in the most open statement I would read hidden meanings. Because I couldn’t bear the thought of her so much as touching another man, I feared it all the time, and I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of the hand.
‘Wouldn’t you want me to be happy, rather than miserable?’ she asked with unbearable logic.
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? […] If there is a God who uses us and makes us his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.
He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt: only when he is there with me, in me, does he feel safe. If only I could make him feel secure, then we could love peacefully, happily, not savagely, inordinately, and the desert would recede out of sight. For a lifetime perhaps.
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 though, I’ve got to be careful. I mustn’t be like Richard Smythe, I mustn’t hate, for if I were really to hate I would believe, and if I were to believe, what a triumph for You and her. This is to play act, talking about revenge and jealousy: it’s just something to fill the brain with, so that I can forget the absoluteness of her death. […] She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
‘Oh, she doesn’t belong to anybody now,’ he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was—a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint’s her bones could be divided up—if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn’t everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.
It’s just a coincidence, I thought, a horrible coincidence that nearly brought her back at the end to You. You can’t mark a two-year-old child for life with a bit of water and the blood. If I began to believe that, I could believe in the body and the blood. You didn’t own her all those years: I owned her. You won in the end, You don’t need to remind me of that, but she wasn’t deceiving me with You when she lay here with me, on this bed, with this pillow under her back. When she slept I was with her, not You. It was I who penetrated her, not You.
