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Death In Virgina Woolf's The Death Of My Father

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Death comes to us all, though we try not to acknowledge this fact. In reality, we are surrounded by life and death constantly as they are the fundamental states of being and non-being to existence as we are capable of perceiving it. Steve Martin’s essay “The Death of My Father” is about far more than his father’s death, as Martin takes great care in using his dysfunctional relationship with his father to illustrate how his imminent demise not only brought his family together but also enabled him to understand the motivations behind his father’s often callous and belligerent behaviour. Virgina Woolf’s essay “The Death of a Moth” engages with the ubiquity of death as the universal experience of all things that live, and the strangeness of life …show more content…

Passively observing the struggles of a moth, and considering it ‘pitiable’ that in a world of vast potential experiences, this moth’s life-force was relegated to flying erratically back and forth in her living room. It occurs to her that the moth is nearing death, and while she contemplates helping it, she quickly realizes that it is futile as “nothing, [she] knew, had any chance against death.” By watching the ‘pathetic’ little moth struggle against a force that could not be overcome – and empathizing with it – Woolf realizes that the moth’s vain struggle is a “wonder” and exemplifies the universal struggle of life in all its forms against the inevitability of death. Just as Martin gains insight into his life by empathizing with his father, so to does Woolf by empathizing with the moth.
This paper has argued that both essays reveal the importance of empathy as a central component of coming to terms with the inevitability of death and its significance in life. Martin’s empathy for his father allows him to re-evaluate his life and better understand his father’s behavior toward him; Woolf’s essay uses the seemingly trivial example of a dying moth to illustrate the strangeness of life and death, and how in some fundamental sense all forms of life are engaged in the same

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