SOURCE: “Katherine Mansfield: ‘The Fly,’” in Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, Mouton and Company, 1966, pp. 68-74.

In the following excerpt, Rohrberger claims that all the characters in the story are themselves symbolically flies, each acted upon by a cruel controlling force.

“The Fly” was published in 1923 in The Dove's Nest, Katherine Mansfield's last published volume, Sylvia Berkman, in her critical study of Mansfield, says that the central symbolism in “The Fly” is confused:

Obviously the boss stands for a superior controlling power—God, destiny, or fate—which in capricious and impersonal cruelty tortures the little creature struggling under this hand until it lies still in death. At the same time the boss is presented as one who has himself received the blows of this superior power through the death of his only son in the war. Thus the functional role which the boss plays in the story...