A Study Of Genres On Graham Greene's The End Of The Affair

Graham Greene is one of the most important British writers in the 20th century. William Golding declares that Greene"will be read and remembered as the ultimate twentieth-century chronicler of consciousness and anxiety". In his entire prolific writing life, he created novels, short stories, plays, travel books, essays, criticism and biographies. But as a widely acclaimed and popular author, Greene is best known for his novels, especially for his religious novels. The End of the Affair which was published in 1951, is considered his last and most typical Catholic novel. This paper aims at analyzing this novel by the genre approach in order to explore the value of genre analysis.This paper is divided into six parts. Part one introduces Graham Greene, his Catholic novel, The End of the Affair and current research on this novel at home and abroad. And then introduces the present research of genre study. Following this, the subject and value of this paper are to be clarified.Part two deals with the autobiographical novel, one of the typical characteristics of The End of the Affair. The novel uses the first person narrator. It's not difficult to find that this novel has closed relationship with the author himself from Greene's own biography. And the characters in the novel have antetypes in the reality.Part three focuses on the diary novel. Sarah's diary is comprised of the third book among the five books of The End of the Affair which displays the spiritual struggle, the chief concern of the novel. And the form of expenses account, report and letters also impulse the development of the plot and reveal the truth step by step.Part four elaborates the social novel. The background of the novel is the Second World War. People's spiritual crisis and disbelief in God found fully reflection in Greene's The End of the Affair. Through analyzing the background and the religious element in the novel, the personalized landscape Greeneland is fully unfolded and Greene's unorthodoxical religious view is discussed.Part five deals with the magic realism novel in which the magical elements appear in the realistic setting, such as miracles and coincidences plus the complexity of time. All these aspects are the embodiment of magic realism novel.Part six is the conclusion, in which the view of this thesis is to be presented again. And the value of genre analysis in this novel is exposed.