Although a complex story, “Order of Insects” is unified by a single thematic focus that derives from William H. Gass’s training as a philosopher at Cornell and his career as a teacher of philosophy, primarily at Washington University. The story dramatizes the fundamental dichotomies of the Platonic idealist point of view, with the obvious, easily perceived, apparently real world as actually an insignificant reflection of a deeper, more important reality. The narrator’s seemingly orderly and complete life as a housewife and mother is exposed as insignificant, incomplete, and confused compared to the order and beauty that she finds in the world beyond herself—in the bugs in her carpet. She admits that she once believed that love meant chaos and that life was inherently tumultuous and confusing. Both beliefs are descriptive of her housewife’s life, but the world’s larger reality, epitomized by the bugs, shows her that she could take control of her life, and discover peace and orderliness in all things, if she could devote herself totally to study and appreciation. Thus she could transcend her physical being (false reality) for the life of the mind (true reality of spirit and intellect). She feels like Galileo in her intellectual discoveries but admits that her physical self struggles against the mental joys and tires of the intellectual effort.

The bugs represent this inverted reality, too: Their bodies, although splendidly intact with the Egyptian permanence of mummies, are presented as only light, empty cases lacking the heaviness—the fundamental realness—of their souls. Similarly, the narrator notes, humans tend to value the temporary, the unreal in others: the external features, comprising muscles, water, and adipose tissue, which are proven least real, least substantial, because of how rapidly they deteriorate. Human bones, more real, last much longer, and the human soul, the least tangible and least obvious, is most real and is, in fact, eternal. Thus, through study beyond the surface or superficial, the narrator pierces to the real, the world’s dark soul, which casts a large shadow over the superficial housewife’s reality. Because she is still trapped in the unreal, her body, the narrator cannot escape to the reality of pure mind. Despite feeling shell-like as her imagination roams in the wonders of the intellectual universe, the narrator is still trapped in the duties of her earthly role as wife and mother. This is her psychological dilemma.

Gass’s story illustrates that progress toward that Platonic reality is possible via intellectual development, that the special, godlike human quality of mind allows humans fleetingly, at least, to comprehend the wonderful order, completeness, and spirituality of the universe. Gass suggests that the struggle to achieve such comprehension is what living a meaningful, fulfilled life is really about, whether one is Stephen Hawking studying black holes and the universe’s origin, or Jane Doe keeping the carpet clean and the baby’s diapers washed.