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.
Background
Historical Context: Postwar Britain
“The Destructors” was published in 1954, less than 10 years after World War II. During this relatively short period, many writers, artists, and intellectuals—Greene included—tried to make sense of this global catastrophe that resulted in the Holocaust and approximately 60 million soldiers and civilians dead. Much of London was destroyed in Germany’s bombing campaign known as the Blitz. Houses were reduced to rubble, and many children became war orphans. While Great Britain was a leader among the Allied powers who won the war, the peace proved to be costly. The transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy involved shortages, deprivation, and unemployment. Moreover, the means used to win the war, such as the use of firebombs in Germany and nuclear bombs in Japan, struck some as barbaric and hypocritical. National purpose dissolved as the unifying war effort devolved into political squabbles in the postwar period. Moreover, the end of World War II led quickly to the Cold War and the fear of nuclear annihilation.
The boys of the Wormsley Common Gang are too young to remember the war. They know only the privation and cynicism of the postwar period and the omnipresent dread provoked by the Cold War. Greene’s “The Destructors” portrays a terrifying nihilism and amorality that perhaps resonated with readers in postwar Britain. While historical figures like Winston Churchill led a wartime effort to preserve British civilization against foreign destruction, this story shows this same civilization destroying itself from within. The German Blitz could not destroy this historic home designed by Britain’s greatest architect, but a group of British boys reduces it to rubble only a few years after the end of the war.
Ideological Context: Catholicism and the Backlash to Science
Following the European Scientific Revolution, which began in the 17th century, religious explanations of reality lost ground to scientific thinking. More and more, people embraced philosophical materialism—that is, the belief that nothing exists beyond matter and that values are human inventions: nothing is innately good or evil. Shakespeare’s character Hamlet expresses this relativistic view in his famous quip, “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2). Many endorsed—and continue to endorse—the view that moral principles are human inventions that have no authority over the conscience.
Yet the technological achievements of the Scientific Revolution raised the most profound moral questions. By the time Greene published “The Destructors,” technology had been used to kill tens of millions in the Holocaust and World War II. And the world stood under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Modern technology called for moral guidance more than at any time in history, but the scientific worldview that generated that technology had no moral guidance to offer. Science is a rigorous method, but it provided no guide to morality. The character of T expresses an extreme version of this paradox: He believes in matter but nothing else. In this moral vacuum, senseless destruction becomes as rational as anything else.
Many people, including Greene, called for a return to religion as a source of moral framework. The Christian God is personal, a deity who knows everyone personally and completely. God feels no indifference to humankind. In this view, morality is not arbitrary or socially constructed. It is ordained by God who made and loves humanity. If morality were truly a social construct, the Wormsley Common Gang’s destruction of Old Misery’s house wouldn’t be wrong if the boys—the majority—decided it was right. In “The Destructors,” Greene satirizes what philosophical materialism looks like in a world without religion and perhaps provides a warning about the consequences of philosophical materialism.
Cultural Context: Donnie Darko
The cult film Donnie Darko, released in 2001 and set in 1988, makes several references to “The Destructors.” Donnie, a psychologically “troubled” teenager, discusses the story in his English class and is quick to focus on the suggestion that destruction is a form of creation. Donnie goes on to flood his high school, similar to how the gang floods Old Misery’s house. He too lives in a so-called reasonable society. His high school requires him and his classmates to wear uniforms and, in one classroom exercise, to reduce their feelings to either fear or love. He argues that the exercise and his teacher have failed to recognize the complexity of human life. This same teacher later demands that “The Destructors” be banned from the school curriculum, implying that the story inspired one of the students—no one but Donnie knows who yet—to flood the school.
While there are similarities between Greene’s gang and Donnie, there are some crucial differences as well. Donnie, unlike the Wormsley Common Gang, lives in a financially comfortable suburb. And unlike T, he believes in the significance of emotions and values. Though he wants to tear the world apart, he is not amoral or indifferent. Rather, he resents the hypocrisy of the society around him and hopes that destruction will bring about something better. As in “The Destructors,” Donnie destroys a house, but he does so in moral judgment of its owner not out of mere nihilism. A highly emotional character, Donnie, unlike the gang members, very much takes a personal interest in what he destroys.
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