“The Destructors” and “The Lottery” Fiction Essay

Introduction

Some may say that we are, as human beings, a violent people by nature. We see it in our own history of wars and genocide that the violence in us can grow to extreme proportions. These two stories, “The Destructors” by Graham Greene, and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, show us that some of the violence can be brought on by people simply following blindly. Whether we look at the past or the present, these two short stories, show us the mob mentality can be very dangerous. The long dead tradition of “The Lottery” tells of the town people forgetting most of the different parts of the tradition because it takes too long, or is not feasible. The one part they never forgot was the violent murder of one of their own people because of an old tradition that sacrifices a scapegoat each year.
In “The Destructors”, a grand home still standing in a war-torn England would never have been torn down by a gang of teens if they weren’t following blindly, the one person leading the group, and succumbing to peer pressure.
This shows that all it takes is a single person, or an old tradition that can convince a group to commit unnecessary violence.

Greene’s book “The Destructors”, and Jacksons “The Lottery”, both show pointless acts of violence brought on by an individual that has people following them or a group of people following a long dead tradition. These acts of senseless violence could have been avoided if the majority of the people in the two stories wouldn’t have followed blindly to keep old traditions alive, or succumbing to peer pressure in an act to be accepted or be cool. In “The Destructors”, the boys in the Wormsley Commons Gang followed Blackie and Trevor fully and ended up participating in the destruction of an innocent man’s home. Before Trevor took the gang over, Blackie was in