The Death Of The Moth By Virginia Woolf Analysis

In the short story, “The Moths”, the narrator, a fourteen year old girl, assumes the responsibility of taking care of her cancerous and dying Abuelita. Her Abuelita is the only person who understands the narrator and the only person she feels she can turn to. After having followed man’s rules for so many years, Abuelita passes away. All the moths that lived inside her are freed and the narrator learns some life lessons. Helena Maria Viramontes uses symbolism and setting to illustrate the oppression of women in “The Moths.”

Pathetic Fallacy is a literary technique used in the setting to reflect the feelings for the characters. In terms of Helena Maria Viramontes’s short story, “The Moths,” this technique is used to reflect Abuelita’s character. In the beginning, Abuelita’s house was full of life, having a garden full of avocados, sweet potatoes, and chayotes. The

Contrary to many people, including Woolf’s, beliefs, death is not the end of life. The moth becomes bigger than itself. It was a normal moth, yet its untimely death benefitted Dillard. Though reading a book may not be considered great, Dillard enjoys it, and would not have been able to enjoy it without the ultimate sacrifice performed by the mere moth, which became bigger in a single moment.

Annie Dillard’s piece “The Death of the Moth”, is about Dillard being reminded of the death of a moth she observes and how it relates to herself, this piece is a great depiction of the impact of life and death. Dillard describes her surroundings living in a rural area and within her bathroom is a spider which Dillard reminds of a moth that she killed in her past when she sees the web that the spider has spun and how it has caught many bugs including two moths. She is intrigued by the dead moth’s bodies and givings a vivid description of the bodies While describing the moth’s dead torn body she relates it to a personal experience from her past where she watched a moth die with candle two years ago. Dillard described the burning moth in vivid

Dillard's primary analogy is that of a spider. an exercise in parallelism connecting between the fourth and tenth paragraphs, literally—printed as a book, the fourth paragraph is superimposed on top of the tenth; this cannot be a coincidence. Dillard is the spider, and the husks of insects are her students, in correspondence with stereotypical impressions of schools. Just as the spider leaves the insects empty, it is a commonly held belief that schools suck children dry, empty. The spider is hanging over the mess of bugs like Dillard speaks in her classroom. But there are different types of insects, sowbugs, earwigs, and moths. Sowbugs, just like a sow's ear, are run of the mill students, uniform, unimpressive, and simple passing through. Covered in a coat of thick armour, it is difficult for Dillard to reach the sowbugs, engage them, interest them. Ambling along, they will pass through her class much the same as the went in, their looks never changing, yet all the while fragile enough to be on the brink of destruction: the epitome of a "C" student, an unengaged student who scarcely skates by. They are "hollow and empty of colour," scarcely being noticed. Then there are the mysterious shreds of an earwig, a corpse who somehow seems less present, but still shows promise, "shin[ing] darkly and gleam[ing]"; the whole creature which Dillard describes only superficially, lacking the vivid imagery and relying instead on scientific nomenclature. The moths are last, described as "wingless and huge" and as "arcing strips of chitin...a jumble of buttresses for cathedral vaults," signifying that she has students, the Nick, Margaret and Randies,

In her essay, Woolf resorts to a melancholic, even a sad tone. Watching the moth and its unsuccessful attempts to get out of the windowpane to where life goes on, Woolf feels towards him “a kind of pity” (195). The word “pity” pops up in the work constantly, which puts reader into sympathetic mood. Then, describing the moth’s last effort to escape from the glass trap and her useless try to help it, Woolf uses a helpless tone. As well as the moth, she gives up. There is no way one “had any chance against death” (Woolf 195). These words evoke a hopeless feeling that there is no way out, no matter how hard we try.

Dillard uses many unusual language choices to create more meaning in the story both in physical and figurative parts of the essay. While Dillard is in her bathroom calling attention to the spider’s web, she uses both inversion and repetition, “Her six-inch mess of web works, works somehow, works miraculously, to keep her alive and me amazed” (2). This sentence uses “works” repetitively in succession, this seems to reaffirm that the web is the device that captures the dead bugs and shows her awe towards the spider’s mechanism. This sentence also uses inversion with the phrase “me amazed,” the words have been switched from the syntactically correct “amazed me.” Dillard also uses repetition not isolated in a single sentence to create meaning and emphasize the

It is often said that death is an inescapable inevitability in life. In Virginia Woolf’s narration “The Death of the Moth,” the struggle between life and death is depicted exactly as such—a battle that is not, in the end, ever won. Woolf utilizes rhetorical devices such as tone, fragmentation within the narration, and metaphors to convey this message and invoke the feeling of pity in her reader. As the tone shifts throughout the piece, Woolf’s metaphors and stylistic choices strengthen and drive home the idea that death is the one fight that can’t be won.

First, the moth is “content with life”—a feeling the reader may share with the moth. Woolf states that the moth enthusiastically appreciates “meager opportunities to the full.” The enjoyment of such measly opportunities displays the moth’s primitive, naïve nature. This nature follows the moth all of the way until the end; the moth gives into death because it knows it’s weaker. During the last minutes of the moth’s life, Woolf searches for “the enemy against which he [struggles].”

“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf explains the life of a moth that is centered around a role that represents life. The theme is the mystery of death and the correspondence of the life of the moth with the true nature of life. Death is a difficult subject for anyone to speak of but it part of life. The Death Process, the struggling and fighting against death.

After the introductory paragraph, she emphasizes the words “life” and “flew,” informing the reader that the insect is acting vivaciously. Despite this, she contrasts the motions of the moth with the phrase “frail and diminutive.” By doing this, Woolf briefly dives into the potential meaninglessness and redundancy of life, as one can continuously act in a manner which accomplishes nothing valuable. Plus, deeds which seem like major accomplishments can barely create a dent in the big picture. Later, she continues her parallel structure by using binary words and phrases when describing the fate of the bug.

Virginia Woolf "The Death of the Moth" focus on a moth, something a lot of us would find to be insignificant. A whole essay about a moth that dies in the end because it got trap between the panels of a window. No that is not the point of the story but instead to show that little things like the moth who holds the same values to the world just like anything else. Unfortunately that isn’t how we see things because we ignore those like the moth that hold no significant mean to our lives. When Woolf talks about a moth having the same life energy that is within all of us mention by Woolf “The same energy which

Virginia Woolf, an early twentieth century English modernist, uses a combination of symbols,imagery, and diction to demonstrate to her audience the ultimate struggle between life and death and the inescapable inevitability of death.

     Death is a difficult subject for anyone to speak of, although it is a part of everyday life. In Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth”, she writes about a moth flying about a windowpane, its world constrained by the boundaries of the wood holding the glass. The moth flew, first from one side, to the other, and then back as the rest of life continued ignorant of its movements. At first indifferent, Woolf was eventually moved to pity the moth. This story shows that life is as strange and familiar as death to us all. I believe this story was well written and will critique the symbolism, characters, and the setting.

The loneliness that Jane has as a child is not enough to hold her back. She conveys the meaning of being a bird, “Birds represent