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Death Of The Moth By Virginia Woolf

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In the story The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf illustrates the universal struggle between life and death. Woolf portrays in passing the valiance of the struggle, of the fight of life against death, but she acknowledges as well the difficulty of this struggle. Woolf’s purpose in writing this essay is to depict the patheticness of life in the face of death, and to garner respect for the awesome power that death has over life. Throughout the essay Woolf adopts a calm, observant, and sophisticated tone in order to present her message and experiences to her readers through imagery, symbolism, and her use of personification. While writing The Death of the Moth, Woolf was concerned with what seems to be the “shift” that was from Intrinsic to Modernism. To set boundaries at the beginning of her essay, Woolf displays a shift of energy, the force that animates her and the moth, through fresh and vivid imagery. The imagery of that very morning …show more content…

The message in the essay once the symbolism of the moth is understood begins to become quite clear. The moth flies, side to side on the window pane and then settles once more as it’s surroundings continued unaware of its movements. Woolf uses this to make the connection between the moth and our everyday lives. It shows how although we may stop, stand still, or pass away life will continue for everyone and everything without our presence. At first, Woolf doesn't care much about the moth, but later feels sympathy towards it as the moth struggled on its back trying to get upright, she helps it and it eventually dies in that position. After the passing of the moth, Woolf states, “Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange" (57). This shows that Woolf believes that life, such as death, is recognized by all and no matter what one person tries to do it cannot be

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