What is the theme of "The Way Up To Heaven"?

“The Way Up To Heaven” is a perfect-crime story. The main
theme is the commission of a perfect murder.

A
supplementary theme involves Mrs Foster's “pathological fear” of being late and her
husband’s passive aggression in deliberately making her anxious about being late. Mrs
Foster does not understand whether her husband is tormenting her
deliberately.

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Mrs Foster was and always had been a good and
loving wife. For over thirty years, she had served him loyally and well. There was no
doubt about this. Even she, a very modest woman, was aware of it, and although she had
for years refused to let herself believe that Mr Foster would ever consciously torment
her, there had been times recently when she had caught herself beginning to
wonder.

So a another theme
might be called “The worm turns.”

Perfect crime stories are
a familiar genre. Edgar Allan Poe wrote several. Such stories can either end in success
or failure. Most often the protagonist plans a perfect murder but gets caught because of
overlooking one detail. Less often the murderer plans a perfect murder and gets away
with it. That is the case in Poe’s famous story “The Cask of Amontillado.” In Poe’s “The
Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” the murderer does get
caught.

Roald Dahl’s “The Way Up To Heaven” strongly
resembles his “Lamb to the Slaughter,” in which Mary Maloney kills her husband with a
frozen leg of lamb and then destroys the murder weapon by cooking it and serving it to
the policemen who are investigating the crime. In both stories the perpetrators are
sweet, domestic, docile women who kill their husbands in a momentary flare-up of
passion.

In “The Way Up To Heaven,” Mrs Foster finally
discovers positive evidence that her husband has been deliberately tormenting her all
these years, and she takes her revenge by letting him get stuck between floors on the
elevator for six weeks while their house is vacant and completely unattended. Both women
get away with their crimes because no one would suspect such devoted and submissive
wives to murder their husbands and also because there is no way of proving murderous
intent.

So the main theme of “The Way Up To Heaven” is the
successful commission of a perfect crime, and supplementary themes are passive
aggression, “the worm turns,” and "the biter bit."

In a
story including "the biter bit," the aggressor is appropriately punished by being
caught, so to speak, in his own trap. Mr Foster would not have gotten stuck in the
elevator if he had not been pretending that he had to delay their departure in order to
go back upstairs to look for a gift he wanted his wife to take to their daughter in
Paris.

At
this point, Mrs Foster suddenly spotted a corner of something white wedged down in the
crack of the seat on the side where her husband had been sitting. She reached over and
pulled out a small paper-wrapped box, and at the same time she couldn’t help noticing
that it was wedged down firm and deep, as though with the help of a pushing
hand.

Mr Foster’s trick costs
him his life. His wife finally realizes the subtle sadist has been deliberately
torturing her with his passive aggression for years, and thus she has the motive for
letting him perish in the stalled elevator. His going back up on the elevator provides
both the motive and the means for his own execution. This bit of irony is what makes the
story appealing.