The Basement Room - Graham Greene - 275 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Graham Greene’s first collection of short stories was The Basement Room and was published in 1935 which were included in the later editions.

The Basement Room is one of Graham Greene’s short stories, told from a third person narrator about a seven-year-old boy Philip’s traumatic experience in his childhood which influences his rest of life till his dying hour at the age of sixty-seven. Philip Lane lived in Belgravia with his parents, the butler Baines and his wife. Without nurses’ restraint, Philip walked into this big house and enjoyed his real life. However, when Mr. Baines had an affair with Emmy and asked Philip to keep the secret for them, Philip began his nightmare. Meanwhile, Mrs. Baines also tried to coax Philip to tell her Mr. Baines’ extramarital relations. Philip is involved in this dilemma. In the end of the story, Mrs. Baines was dead in an accident while Philip still wondered who the girl was sixty years later.



There are two contrasting worlds in The Basement Room, which Philip must recognize and choose between, separated by a green baize door, an image Greene used elsewhere to separate the world of innocence from the world of knowledge, the world of love from the world of hate, the world of the child from the world of the adult.

The sense of guilt is the essential theme of all Greene’s fiction.