The Fly by Katherine Mansfield
Quick answer: The Fly by Katherine Mansfield: complete summary and ending, the fly's meaning, characters, themes of grief and power, and the craft of its final blank.
A prosperous businessman, proud of his refurbished office, is reminded by an old acquaintance that his son's grave lies in Belgium, and an hour later he is dropping ink on a fly to see how much it can survive. The Fly, published in 1922 in the last year of Katherine Mansfield's life, is her starkest story, barely five pages, one office, and one of the most argued-over endings in modern fiction.
Mansfield's own brother was killed in the First World War, and the story sits inside the great postwar silence: six years on, the mourning fathers have run out of ways to grieve. Students meet the story as an allegory hunt, what does the fly stand for, but its power is stranger than allegory. It is a story about a feeling that fails to arrive, and about what a man does with his hands when it fails.
The story in brief, ending included
Old Mr Woodifield, retired and diminished by a stroke, visits his former employer, known only as the boss, who is five years older and still vigorously in charge. The boss shows off his new carpet and electric heating with frank pleasure. As Woodifield leaves, he remembers what he had wanted to say: his daughters, visiting Belgium, came across the grave of the boss's son, near their own boy's, and found the cemetery beautifully kept. The boss barely responds, arranges to be undisturbed, and sits down expecting to weep, as he always wept in the first years. He had lived for nothing but the boy; the business was to have been his. But now, to his dismay, the tears will not come. Even summoning the boy's photograph does not help; the face in it looks stern and unlike him.
At that moment the boss notices a fly has fallen into his broad inkpot. He fishes it out with his pen and watches, absorbed, as it laboriously cleans the ink from its wings and face. Just as the fly is ready to fly, the boss dips his pen and drops a fresh blot on it. The fly repeats its heroic recovery, feebler now. He admires its pluck, breathes on it to help it dry, and drops another blot. The third, or fourth, kills it. The boss flings the dead fly into the waste-paper basket, feels a grinding wretchedness he cannot account for, and rings for fresh blotting paper. Trying to recall what he had been thinking about before, he cannot remember. For the life of him he could not remember. That blank is the last line.
The characters and what they want
Three figures and an insect, each carrying more than its size.
Themes and meaning
Exam readings usually organise around three candidates for the fly's meaning: the sons sent again and again into the war's ink by powerful old men; the boss himself, struck repeatedly by blows of fate; or humanity under an indifferent power that admires our pluck and kills us anyway, a thought with obvious echoes of Shakespeare's flies to wanton boys. All three work, and strong essays hold them together rather than choosing: the story is built so the boss occupies the roles of god and victim at once.
The theme underneath the allegory is grief's expiry, and it is the harsher subject. The boss discovers that six years have done their work: the weeping he planned is no longer available, and time's healing is experienced as a second bereavement. The fly-killing is displaced rage at that discovery, an attempt to make something respond, to locate feeling by administering pain. And the final forgetfulness completes it: the ordinary mind closes over the whole episode. Mansfield refuses the consolation that sorrow at least endures.
The craft: the withheld verdict
Mansfield ends on amnesia rather than judgment, and the choice is the story's engine. A lesser writer would have the boss realise what the fly meant; Mansfield has him ring for blotting paper. The reader is left holding the entire weight of interpretation, which is why classrooms have argued about this story for a century. The technique to steal is the displaced climax: the emotional event, grief failing, happens invisibly, and the visible event, the fly, is its shadow-play. Writers entering contests should note how much power lives in refusing the explanatory final paragraph; rubrics that score storytelling reward an ending that trusts its own image.
Notice also the story's proportions. More than a third of it is the Woodifield visit, carpet, whisky, small talk, before the grave is mentioned. That long preamble establishes the boss's pride in his constructed world, so we can watch one sentence knock it through. And the fly sequence is written with real-time patience, each recovery slightly longer, each blot narrated with the boss's admiring coaching. The horror is in the tempo: cruelty performed at the speed of curiosity.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, present at least two readings of the fly and show how the text supports both; the ambiguity is designed.
- Date the grief: six years since the son's death, and note the boss's shock that tears no longer come.
- Use the photograph detail, the face that looks stern and unlike the boy, as evidence that memory itself has died.
- Writers: when the true event is internal and invisible, invent a small physical action that shadows it exactly.
- End before the character understands; let the reader's understanding be the ending.
- Give cruelty a tempo of fascination rather than anger and it becomes far more disturbing.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character prepares for a strong emotion, grief, joy, jealousy, and it fails to arrive. Have them perform one small, escalating physical action in its place, and end with them forgetting the whole hour.
Questions
What does the fly represent in The Fly?
The story supports several readings at once: the fly as the young men sent repeatedly into the war by powerful old men, the fly as the boss himself under fate's blows, and the fly as any life struggling under an indifferent power. Mansfield deliberately lets the boss play both tormentor and victim.
Why can't the boss cry in The Fly?
Six years have passed since his son's death, and the grief he assumed was permanent has quietly expired; even the boy's photograph looks like a stranger. His dismay at feeling nothing, and his experiment on the fly, are responses to that second, unspeakable loss.
What happens at the end of The Fly?
The boss kills the fly with a final drop of ink, throws it in the waste-paper basket and is seized by a wretchedness he cannot explain. When he tries to recall what he had been thinking about earlier, he cannot remember, and the story ends on that blank.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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