Greene writes various types of short stories each having a different style and mood. Some of the stories are comic as ‘ Alas poor maling’ and ‘when Greek meets Greek’. Others can be deeply shocking as ‘The Destructors’ and ‘Proof Positive’, yet others are hauntingly tragic as ‘ The end of the party’ and ‘The Basement Room’. However the three that appeal to me the most are ‘Alas poor maling’, ‘The Destructors’ and ‘The End of the party’.

In ‘Alas Poor Maling’ Greene uses a direct approach to humour and employs a tongue in cheek style. Throughout the story, he makes use of dramatic and bombastic terms to describe something, which is really small and not dramatic and thus creates humour. Maling is cursed with a peculiar form of indigestion that causes his stomach to replicate sounds that it ‘hears’. When he is at a party, for example, his stomach picks up music from an adjacent orchestra and, to his embarrassment, quietly replays it during a moment of silence. At

The one point in this story that leaves the reader utterly shocked is the fact that there is no recognizable motive for the boy’s destructiveness. Blackie, the deposed leader, thinks that T’s plans must originate in a deep hatred of the old man: “off course I don’t hate him”, T said, “ there’d be no fun if I hated him”. The violence is instinctive, and they don’t meet any remorse for what they have done. By the end the reader is so shocked that he tends to keep on asking himself questions such as “ how could a group of youngsters get up to something of the sort? “ and “ Why did they do it if they had no motive for it? “.

a later date, during the height of the war with Germany, he attends an important meeting at which his employer and representatives of another newspaper company are arranging a merger. Just as they are about to sign the papers, Maling’s stomach reproduces the sound of an air-raid siren (that had been going off during the previous days) and the executer’s rush to the shelter where they remain for twelve hours. Rather than trying to explain, Maling says nothing. The nest day he drops out of sight never to be heard of again. As the narrator observes, Maling’s stomach affectively picked up the air-raid warning, but “ it had somehow never taken to the AL CLEAR”. The ending creates a humorous touch to the story. In a way the manner Greene takles the story makes us feel sorry for making, as it is such a minor thing that he makes it sound trivial. However being trivial to him, and taking it so serious leaves us with a smile on our face.

On the contrary “The Destructors” is a shocking story, as a group of youngsters make the transition from innocence to experience of their

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