Memory and Narrative aspects in Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair"

The book reflects a pure study on Memory and Narrative, James Olney puts his finger on one of the illustrative aspects of the twentieth-century writers. He claims ‘that an agonized search for the self, through the mutually reflexive acts of memory and narrative, accompanied by the haunting fear that it is impossible from the beginning but also impossible to give over, is the very emblem of our time' (Olney 1998: xiv-xv). Olney's is a study of the genre of autobiography, and thus it might seem remote to apply this quote as a point of departure in a discussion of Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair. As a novel, however, The End of the Affair displays many elements which are commonly thought of as belonging to the genre of autobiography, and as such I believe it is in keeping with Olney's claim. The project and predicament Olney accentuates capture the mood and atmosphere of the novel under investigation here in a very succinct way. The main objective of this thesis will be to investigate, and hopefully illuminate, how memory and narrative are presented as two powerful complexes at work in this novel. Born in 1904, Greene was thrown into what is widely regarded, at least