What the "subjective novel" lost, in Greene's polemical reading, was any sense of a necessary interplay between the character and the world around her: a world of moral judgment and evaluation, in which the "human act" has importance precisely to the degree to which one may be held accountable for it. The End of the Affair uses the injunctions of religious faith as a way to discipline the boundaries of social behavior, in a way that allows Greene an apparently old-fashioned novel of adultery in a world where such infidelity no longer seems a matter of overwhelming importance. [...]