The Fly

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.