Shame And Graham Greene's The End Of The Affair: An Analysis

This article concentrates on the issue of ethics in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners (2007), and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951). The study of ethics will not be tackled from a broad perspective of the terms. It will be highlighted and limited to the representation of morality in these novels. Therefore, morality is going to be treated in the light of its negative aspects. The representation of morality is conveyed by the author’s depiction of how ethics deteriorates at the expense of immoral affairs. Thus, three immoral representations are going to be studied. First, the immoral treatment of other characters at the hand of the protagonist is the immoral aspect of Rushdie’s Shame. Second, the marginalization of the blacks is the immoral peculiarity in Phillips’s Foreigners. The blacks suffer from certain marginalization which makes them inferior to their white counterparts. Third, the immoral and prohibited relationships between the protagonist and other women are going to be the …show more content…
Rushdie starts the novel by introducing the spatial setting. Rushdie sets the novel on a border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He focuses the story on three sisters who raise a son named Omar Khayyam. They instill confidence in Omar and instruct him not to feel shame, the equivalent of the word ‘sharam’ in Arabic. Because of this, Omar becomes sexist as well as misogynistic in his relations with females. Rushdie inserts conflict into the narrative when another character is suspicious of Omar and his predilection towards immoral life. However, the theme of immorality is second to the theme of shame in the novel, for it is felt in another character. One of the characters, who is twin to another, takes on the shame of the world and becomes a ‘Beast’ incarnate. Omar marries her much to his demise. By the end of Shame, Sufiya, Omar’s wife, beheads