Graham Greene deals with various subjects in his novel, The End of the Affair. According to the point of view Bendrix and Sarah can be separately brought to the fore as a protagonist. However, this paper will focus on Sarah’s promise to God from the biblical perspective of a vow. According to biblical sources there are some words of vow, oath, swear, pledge. In terms of the semantic meaning of a word 〈neder〉 corresponds to ‘vow’, 〈?ebu‘a〉 to ‘oath, swear’. 〈Neder〉 is holy and religious and cultic. For this reason to break a vow is consequently to profane it. God condemns it as a religious transgression. The promise inherent in a vow is always of a religious, cultic nature. Another Hebrew word for a promise is 〈?ebu‘a〉, which can be translated into ‘oath, swear’. In most cases 〈neder/n?der〉 is used in the case of making a vow to God. But 〈?ebu‘a〉 is used in the case of swearing to a man or one’s oneself.
As soon as Sarah sees Bendrix’s arm under the ruins collapsed by German bombs she thinks of Bendrix as the dead already, and immediately kneels on the floor and pray to God as follows: “I love him and I’ll do anything if you you’ll make him alive, I said very slowly, I’ll give up him for ever, only let him be alive with a chance.” This is surely her first vow to God. Sarah’s first vow to God approaches to the meaning of 〈neder/n?der〉. Although she makes a vow to God in Hysteria the nature of her promise as a vow is holy. Thus it is a natural result that she walks on the way to the state of grace in the future.
However Sarah cannot escape from an anxiety and skepticism. So she makes a vow as follows: “I’m not going to worry about you any more, I said to God as I walked across the Commons, whether you exist or whether you don’t exist, whether you gave Maurice a second chance or whether I imagined everything ... I’m going to make him happy, that’s my second vow, God, and stop me if you can, stop me if you can.” At the first glance her second vow seems to upset the first vow. But in spite of the “vow” the second is not a vow but oath, swear because “stop me if you can.” The nature of a vow is that ‘I will do if you do anything for me’. In this case there are two subjects(doers), that is ‘I’ and ‘Thou’. A true vow is made between “I and Thou” as Martin Buber stresses in his scheme of dialogic hermetics. Then, there is only “you” in her second vow Thus it can be said that Sarah makes a vow to herself. In other words, the second vow is made Sarah and herself. For this reason we can say that Sarah’s second vow is not vow itself but oath, swear.