I don't know if I necessarily agree that T. is "mentally
disturbed" as you put it in your question. However, semantics apart, we are given a real
indication about T., or the "new recruit", in the second paragraph of the story which
gives a real insight into the way he thinks and also gives us a real clue as to his
motivation for the destruction:
...the fact that his father, a former architect
and present clerk, had "come down in the world" and that his mother considered herself
better than the
neighbors.
Thus we can see
that T. has suffered both in terms of being raised in an atmosphere of conflict and
resentment but also in terms of growing up in a post-war reality that has been the only
world he has ever known - a time of the moral destruction of society, the collapse of
hope and the onset of cynicism and despair. In this environment, therefore, we can
understand why T. takes such an obsessive, focussed interest in the destruction of the
house, for as the story says, "and destruction after all is a form of
creation."
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