STORIES OF OURSELVES

        ‘The Fly in the Ointment’ by V.S Pritchett is a short story about the relationship between a father and his son. It is about a son who tries to be caring and helpful to his father when his father goes bankrupt. The father tries to be optimistic and he restrain his need of money and start another steady kind of life but when the son starts to offer him money, his strong desire for money comes out again and is controlled by it.

 

        Pritchett’s style in this story is unique in that it focuses more in the interaction of the characters rather than in the narration of a plot. This means that the actions and reactions of the characters are what move the plot forward while also creating an atmosphere with the mood of the characters. The ambiance is set almost instantly through Harold’s thoughts. Immediately, we can sense the uneasiness of his visit as he says that he ‘naturally.. had to come’. This gives the readers the idea that he felt obliged to visit his father even though he didn’t want to, highlighting the tension between the father and son.

 

        Another significant technique that Pritchett uses is that he easily switched from one character to another and switched perspectives, while preserving the atmosphere of the story. While this occurs, Harold and his father still come out as two completely different forces of energy; Pritchett is effective in portraying that the father’s energy completely consumes that of Harold’s. The father teases his son by calling him ‘Professor’ but actually ‘despised his son’ and only thought of him as a ‘poorly paid lecturer at a provincial university’. When Harold is around his father, he often feels self-conscious and nods ‘with embarrassment’ as his father tries to grab every opportunity to criticize him from his job to something as simple as his ‘hair going thin’. The readers can feel that the father’s switch from mellow, to hard, to almost evil, completely affects Harold and weakens him through the way the author describes his actions.

 

        However, symbolism played the most crucial role in this story; it is what connects the story to the title ‘The Fly in the Ointment’. ‘A Fly in the Ointment’ is a proverb or saying that means something spoils a situation that could have been pleasant. This is shown in the story literally by a fly that enters the room and the old man overreacts about it, foreshadowing that everything is not as they seem; things are not all right. When the father is unable to kill the fly, it connotes how the father cannot get rid of his attachment to money and greed. Although he put so much effort into swatting it that it leaves him ‘out of breath’, he still cannot truly kill or get of this obsession and lust for money. When the fly flies away, it signifies how the father cannot escape this greed. Although the fly is out of sight, the fly is still presents a lingering danger as it could return at any point. This suggests that the father is in capable of change- that even if there are points in the story, especially before the anti-climax, where he appears to have changed, he will always be the same, money-hungry businessman on the inside.

 

        ‘The Fly in the Ointment’ can be compared to ‘The Custody of the Pumpkin’. Both of these short stories present father-son relationships that are tense and where very little mutual understanding or successful communication is able to occur. In ‘The Fly in the Ointment’, the metaphorical fly that prevents the son and the father from actually being able to communicate honestly, is the father's obsession with money. It is his greed that has led him to scam and cheat people along the way, resulted in the closure of his factory and the estranged relationship he currently has with his son.

 

        In "The Custody of the Pumpkin," the father-son relationship is presented in a much more humorous way, but still the relationship between Lord Emsworth and his son is characterised by a lack of understanding and an inability to communicate. Lord Emsworth really only cares about his pumpkin, and his son carries out his romantic engagement in secret, only revealing the existence of Aggie, his bride-to-be, when forced to by his father. He does not want to tell him openly about their secret marriage, and so drops a letter off instead. Emsworth’s feelings about his son are expressed when he meets his son's father-in-law and is told of the plan for Freddie to go to America to learn about his new wife's father's business.

 

        Although the relationship is presented in a much more comic light, it is clear that there exists in this father-son relationship the complete inability of the father to understand the son, or perhaps even to try. The two figures in both stories are unable to communicate.