Death Of The Moth Subjectivity Essay
Emma Rudback
Dr. May
ENGL 100-102
17/02/2023
The Objectivity of Death and the Subjectivity of Life “The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf utilises the death of a seemingly small and insignificant creature to illustrate the peculiarities of life and death, as well as its role in the cycle of all living things. Issues that arise in the elements of literary non-fiction, specifically those of subjectivity and objectivity, work together in order to highlight the themes in this work. Virginia Woolf’s use of both subjectivity and objectivity in “The Death of the Moth” is crucial to exploring its themes of the transience of life and the inevitability of death throughout the work. The death that the moth is experiencing is described objectively,
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As the narrator begins to process what happened to the moth they eventually ponder how it applies to the transience of human life. The narrator often interprets life as something peculiar and conveys how they “could not get over the strangeness of it” (2). The work begins with a picturesque description of the beauties of life, where “the earth was pressed flat and gleamed with moisture” (1). This is quickly juxtaposed with the slow death of the moth, by the end, the narrator finds themselves “apt to forget all about life [after] seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered” as exhibited in the moth. Despite the subjective way she describes her feelings towards life and death, she continuously repeats that death is something that “nothing … had any chance against'' (2), and again when they write that it is an “oncoming doom” (2) that no one could escape. When they finally watch the last efforts of the moth to survive, they find it interesting that “just as life had been strange [before the moth’s death], so death was now as strange” (3). Regardless of how inevitable the death of the moth is, Woolf draws emphasis to the moth’s persistent efforts to stay alive and the ways in which its wings flapped trying to escape. Finally, after much protest, the moth dies and the narrator interprets the death as the moth saying: “O yes … death is stronger than I am” (3), underlining the invincibility of death and the unpredictability of
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