Death Of A Moth Rhetorical Analysis

It is simple reading with the grain the narration of “The Death of a Moth,” but when someone thinks about it deeply in their head, they see how Virginia Woolf was making a connection with the reader. To level up her narration, Woolf uses tone and metaphors to proof her statements about the struggle between life and death and provoke pity in the reader. People can see this through her tone in the passage and the way she emphasizes words to make it clear to the reader. With this, Woolf’s choice in a narration style make the story more personal and chooses the Moth as an eye catcher to the reader.

Through her tone of passage, the reader can start to figure a desperate and hopeless tone. She uses two sets of tone for the audience and

to the reader to maintain the feeling of sorrow. Because of this, people feel emotionally connected to the Moth so when the shift occurred during the fourth paragraph, the reader has a hopeful frame of mind that the Moth may yet live. Only to have this feeling end when it finally does die. This event at the end of the story cause a great impact because before this action occurred, Woolf painted the picture of the moth’s struggle as “marvelous as well as pathetic” and doing so effectively, Woolf uses the tone where she had developed to convey the idea of regardless of how hard one fight is, death is imminent and overpowering of all creatures.

Through the concept life and death, Woolf’s purpose of writing this passage is to convey to the reader that death is everywhere even if we don’t see it.

She reminded the reader how death is overpowering and that each person will struggle with the same problem at their end of their lives. This means that we are born to live and live to die. Just picturing the image of an all-powerful death, it is further enlarged as the effects of death on the rest of nature. Death is reality and it is something that every creature will have to

face.

In this way, the moth’s battle with death can represent the constant struggle Woolf had with her illnesses, with its physical ups and downs parallel to her highs and lows in her own personal battles. Woolf suffered from manic depression and bipolar disorder. So the moth represents death but not necessarily bc she uses a plural “moths” stating that nobody is safe from death, but since she's writing about herself. It means that nobody is safe from something negative in their lives; in which her would be her mental illnesses.The eventual resignation and acceptance of death acts almost as a justification for Woolf’s suicide, saying that after many successes and failures against such demons any individual can’t always keep fighting. A common theme maintained throughout the piece is the indifference of the outside world.

We then can see how Woolf sums up her point in her piece in two sentences, both in the last paragraph “ nothing, I knew had any chance against death,” and “oh yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.” Woolf utilizes her appeal to pathos and tones of pity and hopelessness through her writing style and vivid metaphorical references to invoke empathy and acceptance in the reader for not only others, but themselves as well.

The reader’s inner self wants to obtain more than they can handle and cares more about themselves even more. That’s why the theme of indifference is involved due survival of the fitness. But life will always create the burning determination for an individual to keep surviving when it is threatened by death, but death fights equally as hard in its efforts to put an end to

life.

Therefore, Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Death of the Moth” makes comparisons about the life and struggles of a delicate insignificant moth to the similar struggles faced by all human life and makes the reader to understand it. Although the moth is a very simple, primal form of life, Woolf still relates to its struggle to survive to the same struggle all people face in leading meaningful lives and overcoming obstacles with as much strength as she had just witnessed in the moth’s battle with death