Summary
Old Mr. Woodifield sits in the boss' green leather armchair, next to his friend, the boss, at his desk. He admiringly comments that the office is very snug, delaying his visit's end. It is time for him to be off, but he does not want to go. Ever since a stroke forced his retirement, Mr. Woodifield's wife and daughters keep him in the house every day except Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, he is allowed to go to the City for a day to visit his friends. His wife and daughters imagine he must be a nuisance to his friends; maybe so, but it brings Mr. Woodifield great pleasure to visit with them. So he visits the boss, who is five years older than him and still healthy, admiring his vigor.
The boss agrees that his office is comfortable, idly flipping his copy of The Financial Times with a paper knife. He is indeed proud of his room, and it gives him satisfaction to sit there amongst it and be admired by frail old Mr. Woodifield. He explains that he has recently renovated the office—an explanation he has given to Mr. Woodifield many times during past visits. He points out the new carpet, red with white wings; the new furniture, bookcase, and table; and the new electric heating. But he does not comment on the photograph of a boy in uniform: it is not new.
Mr. Woodifield starts to tell the boss that there was something important he wanted to tell him. As he tries and fails to remember, his hands begin to tremble and his cheeks grow red. The boss feels sorry for him and, trying to cheer him up, winks and pulls out a bottle of whisky from a locked drawer in his desk. Mr. Woodifield is shocked at the sight of the whiskey and almost tears up—his wife and daughters don't let him have any whiskey at home. The boss replies that they know more than the ladies. He serves up a tumbler of whiskey to Mr. Woodifield, telling him that it will do him good.
Mr. Woodifield drinks and is silent for a moment. Then, as the whisky warms him, he declares that it tastes nutty. He remembers what we wanted to say, and tells the boss how his girls were in Belgium last week to visit their brother Reggie’s grave and discovered nearby the grave of the boss' son. The boss' eyelids quiver but he does not reply. Mr. Woodifield goes on to tell him that the graves are very well-looked after, as if they were at home. He asks if the boss has been over to visit the grave—for various reasons he has not. Mr. Woodifield continues, describing the flowers lining the graves and the nice, broad paths. He pauses and then brightens, saying in outrage how much the hotel charged the girls for a pot of jam. Just because they were over there to visit the graves, Mr. Woodifield notes, doesn't mean they should be charged that much.
With that, the visit is over. The boss agrees heartily with Mr. Woodifield without knowing quite what he is agreeing with and sees him out. When the old man leaves, the boss informs the office messenger that he doesn’t want to be disturbed for the next half hour. Finally alone in his office, preparing to weep, he rests his face in his hands. It had been a shock to him when the old man brought up his son's grave, but for some reason he does not cry. In the past, in the first years after his son's death, the thought of his son would cause great fits of sorrow. Back then, he believed time would make no difference, and he would never recover from his grief. His son was his only son, and the boss had been preparing him to take over the family business. What was it all for, if not for his son? For a year before the war, his son had been learning the ropes in the office. They commuted every day back and forth together, and the boss had felt immensely proud of his son. Everyone loved him; he was a natural.
But that time is over as if it had never been. It has been six years since he received the telegram with the news, but it could have been yesterday. But now the boss can't feel properly sad like he wanted to. He gets up and goes to look at his son's photograph, but the boy's expression in the photo is stern and unlike him.
At that moment, the boss looks down at his ink pot and notices that a fly has fallen in. It is feebly and desperately struggling to climb out, but the edges of the ink pot are too slippery. The boss uses the tip of a pen to lift the insect from the well and onto a blotter. The boss watches the fly as it begins to slowly clean itself, ridding itself of the ink that clings to its wings so that it might fly again. The boss sees in the fly's attitude a sense of joy, that life is about to begin again.
But then the boss has an idea. Plunging his pen into the inkwell, he sends a drop of ink down towards the fly. The insect stays still, stunned and afraid. But then it begins the task of cleaning itself all over again. The boss admires the fly's determination and spirit. Testing it once more, he sends another drop down. A moment of stillness—and then the insect begins to clean itself again. The boss is relieved, but the fly's motions are weaker this time. He decides to do it one last time, but when the ink droplet comes down, the fly lies still. The boss tries to stir life into the fly with the tip of the pen, ordering it to “look sharp!” But it is dead. He uses the blade of a paper knife to fling its corpse into a nearby waste basket, overcome with a feeling of desolation. Pressing the button for the messenger, he sternly asks for fresh blotting paper. As the old messenger goes off in search of the blotting paper, the boss sits trying to remember what it was he had been thinking about earlier. But for the life of him, he can’t seem to recall.
Analysis
Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly" is a typical Modernist short story in terms of its formal elements. Rather than following a linear narrative, the story has only one setting—the boss' office, a symbol of his status and vitality—and almost no plot. Instead, the disjointed narrative is comprised of two distinct parts: the pitiful interaction between Mr. Woodifield and the boss, and the internal anguish of the boss and the fly. As the text transitions from the first part to the second, the narrator's focus shifts too. In the first part, the omniscient narrator provides some context about Mr. Woodifield's home life, and notes a few of the boss' thoughts, but the text mostly progresses through dialogue. In the second part, however, the boss finds himself alone in the office and the text turns inward, revolving solely around the boss' tortured mental state. The narrator dives deep into the details of the boss' brain, his observation of a fly struggling to rid itself from ink, and his shifting emotions. The focus on inner life as opposed to linear narrative is characteristic of formalism. The story is rendered even more powerful by the subtle slide from an interaction between two men to one man's internal experience.
Although formal elements such as the narrative of the story are disjointed, "The Fly" is nevertheless tied together by highly coherent thematic material. An important site of internal struggle that crosses over from the first part into the second is the characters' struggle for memory. Mr. Woodifield has difficulty remembering what he wanted to tell the boss, and the boss takes this lapse as a sign that the old man is "on his last pins." Mr. Woodifield's lack of memory renders him pathetic, even emasculated, compared to a baby in a pram. In contrast, the boss is "still going strong" and feels satisfied at the contrast between him and his friend. Yet by the end of the story, the boss, too, has experienced lapses of memory that threaten to destabilize his sense of his own competence. After preparing to grieve, the boss is distracted by the plight of a fly that has fallen into his ink well. He first rescues it but then, seized by a morbid instinct, flicks ink down at the recovering fly again and again until it breathes its last breath. In the very last line of the text, the boss falls "to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before... For the life of him he [can] not remember." Thus the story comes full circle in demonstrating the overlap of symptoms between Mr. Woodifield and the boss, despite different causes. By rendering both Mr. Woodifield and the boss weak with lack of memory, Mansfield is perhaps suggesting the existence of a deep-rooted pathology of memory loss common to more than just her characters.
The influence of World War I also looms heavy over "The Fly," as it did over much of Modernist literature and, indeed, over Katherine Mansfield's personal life. In 1915, Mansfield received word of her brother's death and wrote in her journal: "The present and the future mean nothing to me... the only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened or was when we were alive." There is a clear parallel between Mansfield's words and the boss' feeling that "life itself had come to have no other meaning" after his son's death.
"The Fly" is both a deep exploration of a man's inner life and social critique. On one hand, the boss is unable to process his emotions. Although he deliberately plans to weep, his mourning is blocked for some unknown reason. Perhaps because of this blockage, he continues the cycle of violence, leveraging his power over the fly to torment it and ultimately drive it to destruction. In this way, "The Fly" epitomizes Elaine Showalter's observation in a 1977 essay that "in the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, the moment of self-awareness is also the moment of self-betrayal." As the boss nears the precipice of realizing his own grief, he distracts himself with destructive and violent behavior.
At the same time, "The Fly" can also be read as social critique of the cycle of violence perpetuated by men and epitomized by World War I. The boss, for example, is known merely as the boss. Without a specific name, his character contains allegorical potential and can be read as an abstract representation of systems of power. First, the boss himself suffers from the violence and threat of war; World War I has ravaged him through the death of his son. But the boss also enacts this violent dynamic with the fly, playing cruel games with it until he finally dictates the terms of its death. In this way, Mansfield illuminates the cyclical pattern of violence that is so common as to feel inescapable.
