Symbol: Mr. Foster's Jacket
Mr. Foster's jacket symbolizes his attachment to tradition and conventional gender roles. He is described as wearing "a curiously cut Edwardian jacket with high lapels" (31). Since the story clearly is set during the age of international air travel, such attire seems peculiarly outdated, signifying his association with an older time and different way of thinking.
Symbol: The Present
The present that Mr. Foster buys for his daughter symbolizes his character's particular form of cruelty. The present serves as a polite guise under which Mr. Foster can torture his wife as he pretends to have left it in the house. On the outside, the present is a gesture for his daughter, but in reality, it is a way for Mr. Foster to delay their departure even further. Mr. Foster's cruelty is often obscured by politeness and propriety that confuses Mrs. Foster into thinking he could not possibly be intentionally malicious.
Symbol: The Twitch
Mrs. Foster’s eye twitch is the physical symbol of her “almost pathological fear” of being late (28). The fact that Mr. Foster has noticed this also serves to make it a symbol of his success as a purveyor of sadistic exploitation of that fear. He looks to the location of the twitch as a sign that he has gotten to her.
Motif: Ascension
Ascension appears in two major forms in the story: first, through Mrs. Foster's obvious desire to catch her plane on time and make it to Paris to spend time with her daughter and grandchildren. Then, at the end of the story, readers learn of a different form of ascension (or failed ascension), when Mr. Foster gets trapped in the elevator inside their large six-story house. That the story is titled "The Way up to Heaven" questions the morality of each of the characters and ultimately suggests, through the broken elevator, that Mr. Foster's cruelty is fundamentally unredeemable.
