The Fly

The story’s narrative structure changes after the turning point and Mr. Woodifield’s subsequent departure. Read as two parts, the structure characterizes Mr. Woodifield and the boss as foils through the choices they make. The first part includes the time that Mr. Woodifield is in the boss’s office. It ends when he departs, and the boss asks Macey to keep others away for a while. Both men have not visited the graves of their sons. For Woodifield, this decision is due to his poor health. In the second half of the story, it is revealed that the boss chose not to visit his son’s grave to remain in denial about his death. Woodifield is depicted as a frail old man whose memory is failing him, and he requires a shot of whiskey to remember what he wanted to say. The boss also has a failure of memory, but this is once again an active choice made to avoid dealing with his grief.

The contrast of the two men develops the themes of death, grief, and survival. In the first half, Woodifield is presented as a frail, repressed man due to the effects of having a stroke and the coddling of his family. He is a much weaker man than the “stout” boss, who has control of his surroundings and freedom to do what he wishes. However, like Woodifield, the boss is also unable to hold his train of thought in the story's denouement. His is a self-inflicted repression used as a coping mechanism to manage the grief he feels at the loss of his son. The longer the boss remains in his office, the more he is stuck there, much like Woodifield is stuck at home most of the time. Neither man survived the loss of their son unmarred: Woodifield bears the outer physical signs while the boss’s scars are psychogenic.

The two halves of the story also highlight the motif of time. The first part of the story moves from the present (the men's conversation about the office’s decor and the boss's offer of whiskey) to the past when Woodifield recalls his family’s recent visit to Belgium where his son Reggie is buried. The story briefly moves back into the present as Woodifield leaves. In the second part of the story, the boss is alone in the office. The narrative shifts from present (as the boss struggles to understand his reaction to Woodifield’s news) to a flashback of when his son was still alive and the subsequent mourning of his loss. The narrative returns to the present as the boss encounters the fly. This pendulum swing from present to past to present allows Mansfield to thematically explore The Relationship Between Grief and Time and the impact of time on one’s memory and emotions.

Mansfield’s use of the omniscient third-person narrator allows for an outside perspective to impart characters’ thoughts and actions. The narration moves quickly between the third-person narrator and the characters’ internal monologues with little to no indication of the shift. For example, in the first paragraph the narration reads: “All the same, we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves” (74). This comment is an outsider’s perspective, interpreting Woodifield’s decision to visit his boss. The use of the third person “we” breaks the fourth wall to draw in readers. The next sentence, however, shifts midsentence from the narrator’s perception of Woodifield to Woodifield’s perception of his boss: “So there sat old Woodifield, smoking a cigar and staring almost greedily at the boss, who rolled in his office chair, stout, rosy, five years older than he, and still going strong, still at the helm” (74). The first half of the sentence up to the word “boss” remains in the narrator’s point of view, but at the beginning of the adjective clause, the point of view shifts to Woodifield’s thoughts about his boss. Then the sentence after that is fully Woodifield: “It did one good to see him” (74).

When the boss experiments with the fly, the point of view becomes more difficult to clearly attribute to one source over another. For example: “Over and under, over and under, went a leg along a wing, as the stone goes over and under the scythe” (82). The description of the fly cleaning itself in the following passage could be the boss’s observations. However, the metaphor of the scythe characterizes the fly as inferior to the boss, and the repeated imagery emphasizes the inevitability of death. Mansfield uses metaphor throughout the story to similarly characterize Macey and Woodifield as weak or subservient to the boss. Later in that same scene with the fly, the shift between points of view happens midsentence and is ambiguous: “The horrible danger was over; it had escaped; it was ready for life again” (82). The comment that the fly appears “ready for life” is another reminder for the boss to rejoin life after his son’s death. However, the fly dies at the boss’s hand, and the boss fails to explore his grief.