The main characters of the story are Bertha, Harry, Nanny, Little B

The text under analysis comes from the famous by Katherine Mansfield. Bliss is a modernist short story by K. Mansfield, first published in 1920. It was first published in the English Review in August 1918 and later reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories.
The main characters of the story are Bertha, Harry, Nanny, Little B.
Bertha
A thirty-year-old housewife. Believes she is very lucky: good husband, “adorable baby”, “modern, thrilling friends”, materially well-off. Her slightly neurotic joy at everything, even in the fruit she arranges, might mask feelings of deep insecurity. The bliss may be a facade. She can see this tendency in herself: “I’m getting hysterical.”Bertha’s last name is symbolic; she is young and immature. She is not sexually mature, and does not experience sexual bliss with her husband. “How idiotic civilisation is,” she thinks: “Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?” She cannot finish her next sentence and allows herself to be distracted. The reality is too uncomfortable. The couple do not communicate well. The reader observes this when Bertha fails to engage him in a meaningful conversation on the telephone. She only wants to “get in touch with him for a moment”. She describes her relationship with Harry as ‘cold’, yet she is obviously a woman who feels great passion. It is only towards her husband that she is cold. Katherine Mansfield refers to her character of Bertha as ‘artist manquee’, meaning that Bertha can separate language which is her own from the language she has borrowed from others. She knows what is genuine in herself and what she imitates. Yet she doesn’t yet know what is genuine in others.
Harry
Harry is inclined to be aggressive and predatory, not someone the reader easily warms to. He speaks of his ‘shameless passions for the white flesh of the lobster’, as if taking delight in the suffering of his food. He is also pretentious and foolish, describing a poem about a banal topic such as tomato soup as ‘so dreadfully eternal’. Harry is an incompatible husband for Bertha, who is flighty and artistic by nature, looking for splendor everywhere. Harry makes light of Bertha’s interests and sensitivities, ensuring that the two of them will never be more than just ‘pals’. Bertha must search for a deeper connection elsewhere.
Nanny
Plays the maternal, nurturing, down-to-earth role for Bertha’s baby, in contrast to Bertha herself, who does not dare to question Nanny’s authority.
Little B
Bertha’s baby is not yet her own person, instead serving as a reflection of her mother, Bertha. Bertha is not close to Little B, nor is she ‘close’ to herself. She is still working out what she thinks about the world and about her closest friends, not to mention her husband, who she only comes to understand later that evening.

At the beginning of the text the author described the feeling and emotional state of woman. To show it he uses hyperbola «absolute bliss». Also the author uses anthisesis – «to run instead of work» and «to throw up smth in the air and catch it again» – to show her emotional state. She came back home and asled housekeeper whose name was Mary, did the fruits come? Mary said that everything is come. Bertha asked her to bring it to the dining room. Then we can see the description and feelings of not very young woman. Here are such SD: epithet as «bright glowing place», «radiant woman» and metaphors as «shower of little sparks» and «air of listening waiting for somebody» for more bright expression what this woman is feeling. At the next part we can see following: among the fruits which Mary brought were tangerines, apples, strawberries, white grapes and big cluster purple grape. Bertha bought it to tone in with her new dining-room carpet. It had seemed quite sense for her at the time when she bought it.

The main idea of this text: people shouldn’t close themselves but enjoy their lives.
Bertha, the protagonist
is in the middle of preparations for a dinner party of which she and her husband Harry are hosting for several friends at their home. At a quick glance, the initial interpretation is a depiction of the wonderful and perfect life Bertha lives, but the reader quickly realizes the illusion created full of irony and satire. Even though the story itself is narrated in a third-person’s point of view, Mansfield’s writing conveys the notion that Bertha is actually the one narrating, making the story seem to take on a first person point of view. Mansfield’s writing appears inconsistent and unstructured, acting as a major factor in the perspective followed by the readers. The broken syntax, short sentences and abundance of dashes and dots directs the reader to Bertha’s present state of mind, brining one to believe that they are following Bertha’s train of thought, as if she is thinking aloud or narrating the story herself. Through this, it allows the readers to have a better understanding of what is going through Bertha’s mind and the problems she is facing and/or denying.
When Mansfield writes, “Really – really – she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as much in love as ever, and they got on together splendidly and were really good pals” the reader is to understand that not only is Bertha is trying to convince herself of her happiness, but to convince the readers of her happiness as well. Certain vocabularies used are strong indicators of the irony and satire that is embedded in the story. Adjectives such as “satisfactory” used to describe their house and garden or the idiom “really good pals” borrowed from Bertha to characterize her relationship with her husband draw attention to how there are underlying problems in her life. More prominent and distinctive words such as “amazing” or “extraordinary” could be used to replace “satisfactory”.
The narrative style shows that Bertha is trying to keep certain truths from herself. In the first paragraphs, she speaks as if observing herself from a distance. Her words are not her own. She thinks one thing then immediately edits herself, as if observing herself taking part in some drama. Bertha’s words are not her own, simply a collection of quotations gleaned from elsewhere. The writing is indirect and elliptic, leaving things out, hinting and suggesting rather than declaring outright. Much use is made of dots and dashes, especially in this story. Ellipsis reflects Bertha’s inability to see her own situation for what it is; a romantic attraction for a woman who happens to be having an affair with her husband. Bertha doesn’t understand her own feelings. Bertha’s feelings are reproduced in breathless, repetitious sentences. The broken syntax – full of dashes and explanation marks – make the language seem spontaneous, like someone thinking out loud. Mansfield takes us inside Bertha’s skin, sharing her insights moment by moment. Bertha is a distinctively feminine voice, using words that only a woman would use: ‘divine’, ‘little precious’, ‘incredibly beautiful’. She also speaks with repetition, exclamation, abrupt shifts of thought (signalled by that dash) and abandoned sentences. This is the sort of language which has seen Katherine Mansfield criticised.
Katherine Mansfield makes a good job of distinguishing Bertha’s feminine voice from Harry’s, which is very much masculine in tone. The difference is important to the main idea: that only another woman would be able to understand Bertha’s feelings of ‘bliss’.
While a plot-driven story would offer the satisfaction of narrative closure – a definite ending – nothing is finally resolved in Bliss. We don’t know if Harry is really having an affair with Miss Fulton. We don’t know whether Bertha is about to confront him. She may have imagined what she saw, or knew it and ignored it. Instead, Mansfield ends with the pear tree: the story’s central image. The pear tree appears at the story’s emotional climax and
therefore provides an emotional closure.