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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Fly in the Ointment, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fathers and Sons
Optimism, Ambition, and Happiness
Self-Delusion
Summary
Analysis
On a bleak afternoon in an economically depressed area of English city, Harold, a 35-year-old man, steps out of a taxi. He’s on his way to visit his father at the factory his father runs, but he gets out a few blocks before his destination, not wanting his father to see that he can afford the fare. The factory is bankrupt and closing today, concluding his father’s 30-year career, which saw him build the business from nothing and then ruin it in vague scandals.
From Harold’s reluctance to display even the meager amount of money for cab fare, readers can intuit that his father is somehow financially untrustworthy. Pritchett builds this suspicion as he reveals that some kind of misconduct on the father’s part—at this point still unspecified—was seemingly responsible for the collapse of his business.
Themes
His father’s sudden bankruptcy has eliminated Harold’s anxiety over his family’s money problems but replaced it with profound pity for his now-penniless father. However, he remains wary of letting his father see any sign of him having money. He walks the last few blocks to the factory.
Harold’s father lets him inside, and they awkwardly exchange greetings. The father walks his son through the silent and empty factory, which Harold remembers from childhood. The father is energetic and well-dressed, whereas Harold is raggedy and balding. The father despises Harold, who is a lecturer at a provincial university. Nevertheless, he shows him around his now empty office and offers him tea. In fact, only one teacup remains from the clearing-out process, and Harold insists that the father drink it.
The father’s confident energy and fine dress—even amidst his professional ruin—both irritate and humble Harold, who is ragged and meek by contrast. The father’s contempt for his son’s meagerness and lack of ambition is in keeping with his own outsized ambition and self-importance. Pritchett emphasizes this imbalance in Harold’s bashful refusal to take the last cup of tea, which his father accepts.
Themes
The father asks Harold about his family, seemingly not having had much contact recently. Harold says everyone’s all right, but he’s worried about his father’s financial straits and future. The father insists that things are fine. As he speaks, Harold notices that his father really has two faces, a small and hard one inside a big soft one. The two seem to alternate in prominence as the father explains how optimism is all that keeps him from suicide in his admittedly uncertain predicament as a 65-year-old man who is suddenly penniless.
The long lack of contact between the two men preceding this meeting indicates both Harold’s wariness of getting involved with his father and the father’s lack of interest in his son. Though he has lost everything, the father still feels empowered to both maintain his “optimism” and use it to browbeat his son. That such optimism alone keeps him from suicide indicates how little thought he has for Harold or the rest of his family. The image of the father’s two faces underscores his untrustworthiness, building on the idea that he doesn’t always represent himself in a reliable or consistent way.
Themes
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The father interrupts himself to point out Harold’s growing baldness, and then he tells him to think big ideas and to stop setting his sights so low—he should aspire to much more than his small-time job as a local lecturer. Harold, insulted, instinctually replies that thinking big is what ruined the father. He attempts to walk that back, but the father is offended, pointing out that many tycoons are going bankrupt lately. A shadow of the window-bars makes the father look like he’s in a prison cell, and Harold suddenly asks if the rumors are true that his father engaged in illegal business practices.
Harold’s baldness emphasizes the strange reversal in this father-son relationship, in which Harold almost serves as a sort of father figure to his own father. The father, for his part, immaturely latches on to Harold’s baldness as a way of demeaning his son and, perhaps, as a way to assert a sense of superiority. In his utter lack of self-awareness, the father keeps insisting on the importance of ambition even in his downfall, and Harold’s piercing retort fails to actually change his father’s mind, only angering him. The father’s sudden resemblance to a convict marks another of the several physical transmutations he undergoes in the eyes of his son throughout the story.
Themes
The father suddenly notices a fly and makes quite an effort to get rid of it, climbing on a table. Suddenly spent, he needs Harold to help him down. Harold asks if he’s all right, but the father redirects the conversation to his son’s baldness again. Harold sees this as a sign of his father’s overall exhaustion and feels new sympathy for him. This sympathy grows when the father recounts the farewell his former employees gave him, shedding a tear.
The fly provides another occasion for the father to demonstrate his contempt for weakness. Yet his own evident weakness in the aftermath of the pursuit evokes a sympathy in Harold that withstands the father’s continued bullying. Harold’s steadfastness in his sympathy seems to provoke the first moment of real emotional connection between the two men.
Themes
The father brings up the question of his mistakes, filling Harold with dread that he will be forced to admit that he’s well aware of his father’s lies and malfeasance. In fact, the father makes no such admissions and simply claims that desiring money was his mistake. Now he’s through with money, and all he wants is to escape to a seaside cottage. Aghast at his father’s obliviousness, Harold responds that such an escape requires lots of money. The father disagrees, saying he may find money unexpectedly.
The fantasy of connection between Harold and his father proves short-lived once the father embarks on another grandiose and painfully un-self-aware soliloquy that yet again fails to take responsibility for his actions. Harold’s initial fear that his father might finally open up and acknowledge his crimes proves overly generous, as no such intention ever seems to have occurred to his father.
Themes
Finally, Harold awkwardly says that, despite his own modest means, he can “raise” some money if his father absolutely needs it. Suddenly, his father’s demeanor totally transforms, the smaller version of his face showing itself in a fierce, gruesome manner, and then he starts frantically asking about the money.
As Harold might have suspected, his father has lost none of the greed that defines him, and he furiously unleashes this greed at the first whiff of cash. Long-suffering Harold has thus been confronted once again with the burden of his father’s irresponsibility.
Themes
