The Destructors

The gang members in Graham Greene’s “The Destructors” are catastrophic young children and teenagers who are unfortunately being greatly affected by their surroundings. Placed in wartime London, their town is in rubble from bombings. Peer pressure is no help when a destructive surrounding and vulnerable ages are strongly influencing the instinctive human behavior of the members, which causes many of their horrific actions.

The characters of Greene’s short story are different in their own way. Mike is a childish young boy “at the age of nine [who] was surprised by everything” (50). Trevor, better known as T, comes off to be one of the nicer and more hushed boys in ‘the gang’. “…there were possibilities about his brooding silence that all recognised” (50). Blackie was the gang member who worried that T. was too classy for the gang. “…he was anxious to retain T. in the gang if he could. It was the word ‘beautiful’ that worried him- that belonged to a class world…” (53). However, as the story progresses it comes to be known that Blackie has taken T to be something he is not.

The gang meeting “every morning in an impromptu car-park, the site of the last bomb of the first blitz” has a great impact on their actions. The destruction of the town around them leads T to propose the destruction of a neighboring house which belonged to a man known as Old Misery. Blackie begins to appear to be the more civil of the two boys when he argues against T’s proposition saying “We’d go to jug” and “We wouldn’t have time” (53). Greene even writes “Blackie said uneasily, ‘It’s proposed that tomorrow and Monday we destroy Old Misery’s house’” (53). When the gang votes to follow through with the destruction, Blackie even contemplates giving up his leadership. “He thought of going home, of never returning…” (54). However, he gave into the pressure of wanting to belong to this gang and hold onto his leadership. After all, he had nowhere else to go. “Driven by the pure, simple and altruistic ambition of fame for the gang, Blackie came back to where T. stood in the shadow of Misery’s wall” (54). Not only does the rubble influence the children to act out, but it also desensitizes them, along with the residents of the town. This is shown very clearly when T. replies “Of course I don’t hate him… there’d be no fun if I hated him… all this hate and love… it’s soft, it’s hooey.