What is the theme of loss in the story?

Death, loss, and grief combine to form one of the most important themes in Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly." Both Mr. Woodifield and the boss have dead sons, a result of the ravages of World War I. Mansfield poignantly articulates the trauma of this loss in a paragraph from the boss' perspective. The boss speaks of the "violent fit[s] of weeping" and the feeling that, after death, "life itself had come to have no other meaning."

However, Mansfield also goes a step further, past a simple description of the emotions caused by loss and towards an analysis of the pathology of grief. The boss, for example, has suffered a trauma so great that he can no longer process it; when he sits down to grieve, he cannot cry. Instead, he enacts his emotions as violence on an innocent fly—a perverse manifestation of his loss. Mr. Woodifield, in contrast, retreats in on himself after suffering a very similar loss. Rather than bolstering himself with power, money, success, and violence, he is rendered feeble, pitiful, and weak. This contrast depicts the traumatic impact of death and the twin pathologies of grief.