56 pages • 1 hour read
Graham GreeneThe Destructors
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1954A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Satire
Satire uses humor, irony, and/or exaggeration to ridicule a person, group, or issue, typically one that is a topic of contemporary social, philosophical, political, or religious concern. In one reading, “The Destructors” satirizes English secularism as a gang of boys, the faithful as a doddering old man, and the church—or perhaps religious institutions in general—as a decrepit house. Greene follows this train of thought to suggest to his readers what a secular society without religious guidance will come to. Perhaps with no small amount of reductive malice, Greene takes philosophical materialism to an extreme and suggests secular morality consists in taking rational means (elections, procedures, timetables, etc.) to irrational ends—the pointless destruction of a beautiful and valuable house. The boys’ obedience and organization are almost cartoonish, and—ironically—destruction is celebrated as a form of creation. The story even ends with a bleak but unmistakable punchline.
Allegory
An allegorical story contains a hidden meaning, typically achieved through the use of pervasive and direct symbolism. Though “The Destructors”—like many of Greene’s stories and novels—considers religious themes, religion is rarely mentioned directly in the story. Readers learn only that the house was designed by the architect of St. Paul’s and that the boys begin destroying the house on a Sunday morning. But more lurks beneath the surface. T’s assertion that nothing but matter exists establishes him as a philosophical materialist. Immaterial things like love and hate are “hooey” (11). This refers to everything immaterial, such as good and evil, God and Satan, and heaven and hell. In a world stripped down to physical reality, the destruction of one’s home should not be taken as “personal” (18). Old Misery is likely an allegorical representation of a faithful if doddering Christian overtaken by the nihilistic efficiency of modern civilizations, and his house stands for the church—beautiful and historic but doomed. Though religion is scarcely mentioned in Greene’s story, allegorical representations of Christianity abound.
Irony
Irony refers to a situation or statement that conveys a meaning opposite to its superficial appearance. For example, most of the characters in “The Destructors” are adolescents, but they are anything but childlike or innocent. If anyone in the story is innocent, it is Old Misery, who becomes utterly reliant on the boys for food and warmth. There is also irony to the story’s theme about the illusion of order: The boys are highly organized, follow a chain of command, vote, and even schedule lunch breaks, but they are agents of chaos rather than order. They are described as working “with the seriousness of creators—and destruction after all is a form of creation” (10). This is high irony on Greene’s part. The last line of the story—where the lorry driver says Old Misery must admit that the destruction of his home is funny—is a cruel irony, one that is shocking and unexpected. The operator of a truck who is presumably involved in commerce and building a business is the agent of destruction for Old Misery’s house, and his response is not regret or condolence but rather cruel laughter.
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By Graham Greene
