The Destructors By Graham Greene

“The Destructors” The short story “The Destructors” by Graham Greene tells the story of a gang of young boys who have grown up in war-torn London. When approached with an aberration in their society, the boys resort to demolition in order to restore the order to their town, despite its already devastated landscape. The gang of young boys meets every morning in a lot where “the last bomb of the first blitz” fell. The dreary setting is juxtaposed by the “beautiful” house where “old misery” presided, an older man who lives a quiet life near the boys. The house was a “jagged tooth” that stood out among the rubble of the battle scarred land. Desensitized to the destruction that they were constantly surrounded by, the boys were constantly in the
Even when two of the boys discover Old Misery’s savings, they resolve that they “aren’t thieves,” for “there’s only things” in the house after all. Even when Old Misery returns home early, they take only basic measures in order to finish their jobs; it is not enough to leave the “shattered hollowed house,” they must destroy it until it cannot “be a home.” The way that they treat Old Misery while he is locked in the lav shows that the boys have no desire to hurt him. On the contrary, they respect him more once they destroy his house. Seeing him as a more relatable person, they drop his old nickname and refer to him by his proper name, Mr. Thomas. Their only motive in destroying the house was to rid their home town of an oddity that stood between them and total destruction. Rather than seeing this as a personal attack on Mr. Thomas’s house, the boys saw this destruction as a simple enforcement of equality. In the morning after the destruction, the driver who first discovers the destruction laughs at the situation as he sees the levity in the situation; the house that “had stood there with such dignity between the bombsites like a man in a top hat” was leveled by a dozen motivated