The Fly: Personification 1 key example

The word "plucky" is used to describe someone with unflappable courage in the face of hardship. The mere suggestion that the fly is brave hints at a certain kind of human consciousness, as if it's actually aware of what's happening to it. In reality, the fly is just running on pure impulse as it quickly works to clean the ink from its body. And yet, the boss sees its struggle in a different light, thinking about the fly as if it's a tough, gritty soldier who will never give up—the type of soldier who knows how to "tackle things" with the "right spirit" and will "never say die." Of course, these are all attributes that the boss most likely wants to believe his own son had as a soldier before he died. His personification of the fly thus hints at the connection between his thoughts about his son's death in World War I and his current reality. It also sheds light on why, exactly, the boss keeps dropping ink on the fly in the first place: because doing so is a way of thinking about his son's time in the war without having to explicitly think about it.