The Destructors - Literary Analysis The short story, “The Destructors,” by Graham Greene, depicts a small, rather insignificant gang in post WWII London, approximately 14 years after the first blitz, to be precise, the Wormsley Common gang, consisting of but adolescent teenagers, in their efforts to pull off a fiendish act of great notoriety, to perhaps make a name for themselves among the more “grown-up gangs”. As is the nature of the aftermath of war, there reigns an overlying tone of nihilism, as if to emphasize the unimportance of the way things were, to say “out with the old, in with the new,” in an attempt to portray the youth revolt in London at the time, after all, destruction is, in itself, a form of creation in its own way, as it clears the way to create a foundation on which to make anew. This…show more content… The house is representative of how years ago in days of old, when magic filled the air, they had a paradigm for what happened and how, and even many years later, even in light of war, narrowly avoiding total annihilation, it still stands, albeit, on it’s final legs, but the youth came along and subsequently tore it down, creating a way for a revolution, a newer way of life. “”It’s got a staircase two hundred years old like a corkscrew. Nothing holds it up.” “What do you mean, nothing holds it up. Does it float?” “It’s to do with opposite forces, Old Misery said.”” (Greene, 4) Perhaps an allusion to how tradition works, it stands, surely, but after a while, nothing really holds it up, and it’s kinda just there for people to use and abide by, and the only thing keeping it up is some hocus-pocus with opposite forces, perhaps making an allusion to the war, or even how in ancient times, culture was often spread through war and conquest (a bit of a stretch,
