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  • Essay / A comparison between Greene and Hollywood in The End of The Affair

    What we watch on screen during a film is the culmination of the skills of the artists: writers, directors, animators, actors. When a book is made into a film, screenwriters can use aspects of literary design, which have the ability to modify the themes of the original text for dramatic effect or for viewer satisfaction. The End of the Affair (1999) is an excellent example of how easily this can be achieved using changes in point of view and narrative setup when moving from novel to film. The screenwriter (Neil Jordan) simplifies Greene's original story about the conflict between religious love and human love, resulting in a more basic love story. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayGraham Greene wrote The End of the Affair in the first person, from the perspective of Maurice Bendrix, an up-and-coming writer during the Second World War in England. It is implied that Greene based the character Maurice Bendrix on himself, expressing his anger and bitterness towards his own lover through his writing. In the novel, Bendrix is ​​presented as jealous and stubborn, and he seems cursed with eternal and incurable frustration. In the second paragraph of chapter 1, Greene uses the word “hate” seven times as a quasi-warning to the reader about the nature of his book. It's not a happy story, and the narrator is even less so. It's harder to sympathize with the first person in the book as the pages of ramblings and self-pity blend into a seemingly endless tunnel of unhappiness and depression. However, the film gives a different impression of Bendrix. In the novel, Sarah does not seem real, but rather a sort of dream that he desperately clings to, a vision of desire. The reader cannot see her, and so the only way to know her is through Bendrix's words of jealousy and hatred and the parts of her diary that Greene allows us to read. In the film, she's a beautiful woman - played by Julianne Moore - who audiences might also fall in love with. In this way, it is easier to sympathize with Bendrix because the first-person nature of the book is somewhat lost by adding a third dimension to the other characters. See the characters on screen, as they work and react to each other, falling into the mood. and through love and hate, helps the audience relate. They are more human, more tangible, and those who have been in love can better understand their pain. This change altered the “hate” theme of the story. The novel, at least for the first three books, is truly a story of hatred of Bendrix, while the film presents it as a tragic love story by encouraging its audience to sympathize and support his love and desire for the beautiful Sarah. One of the main differences between Greene's book and Jordan's film is the focus on religion. This phenomenon is attenuated from the novel to the film by the change in narrative configuration, the transition from subjective reality to objective reality. The novel is called "The End of the Affair" for a reason, in that it attempts to find out why the affair ended. Greene writes a heartbreaking line from her story explaining that Sarah ends the affair following a promise she made to God when she thought Bendrix had been killed by a bomb: "I will believe... .I'm going to abandon it. forever, just let him live alive... People can love each other without seeing each other, right, they love you all their lives without.