The End of the Affair Essay | Critical Essay #3

The End of the Affair Critical Essay #3

In the following excerpt, Walker examines the structure of Greene's novel.

What are the thematic implications of such a variegated structure? I cannot hope to expatiate on all of them here, but there is one at least worth pursuing in some detail. Simply stated, it is the idea that reality is malleable not fixed and that what shapes it, continuously, is the sensibility of the human observer, itself always in flux and subject to influence from every quarter. Such a view is of course by no means original with Graham Greene. Writers from Plato on have expressed similar misgivings about the narrowness of the finite epistemologies of their day. But the familiarity of the idea makes it no less unsettling. The various reactions against it have been motivated, at bottom, by the need for ontological security. In self-defense, so to speak, man is forever fabricating alternative explanations which envision...
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