Love, Faith, and Disillusionment: Comparative Visions in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar

الملخص

The paper aims to focus on discussing the way in which love, faith and disillusionment are represented in The End of the Affair by Graham Greene and Miramar by Naguib Mahfouz. The literature analysis will be comparative where the writers will delve on how love and faith is demonstrated by both of them and the repercussions that follow through such experiences of disillusionment. The input of Greene demonstrates the multifaceted relationship according to which love and faith mutually depend on one another and form spiritual awareness in its contradiction. Quite on the contrary, Mahfouz describes love as something that leads to happiness and, consequently, disappointment, which complicates and makes these topics more ambivalent. In the discussion, Greene is more concerned with a harmonious relationship between love and faith compared to Mahfouz who is rather a moderate vision which portrays the plight of love. The dichotomy provides more knowledgeable responses to bigger questions about the nature of love and faith in different cultures and implies that a more thorough understanding of the interplay of both is needed. The findings show that the two authors share the same concern with the common theme of love and faith but they approach the issue differently hence providing valuable information of the nature of human relationship and the spiritual self-exploration. A deeper investigation of the phenomenon may shed more light on other aspects of their respective literary work. The current discourse is based on the approach of comparative analysis of literature, and each text is the main source of primary data. These imaginary accounts are instructive descriptions of the theme, but relate to the wider literary-historical domain of the novel. Additional historical sources and critical papers can be used to create a structure of comparative notions of love and faith, disillusionment, and supporting narrative attributes. Sticking to a thematic focus also allows looking at the relationship between love and other secondary concepts longing, doubt, ambivalence, and moral culpability without bypassing the state of love itself.