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.