Abstract

Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair is a modernist conversion narrative that exposes cultural tensions around the post-War era’s preponderance of Catholic conversions. Like narratives written to vindicate the conversions precipitated by the Oxford Movement in the previous century, The End of the Affair explains how characters come to a certain belief that is largely derided by the prevailing culture. In contrast to the rational deliberation of these earlier models, conversion to Catholicism in this novel is distinguished by its irrationality, through a structure of over-determination, a rhetoric of imitation, metaphors of touch and contagion, and suggestions of supernatural intervention. Attending to the thematic of conversion highlights elements of the novel obscured by reading it as either a secularist novel or a moral theological novel — namely, elements that are particular to the hermeneutics of conversion narratives in depicting a character’s dynamic evolution from one set of beliefs to another.