Analysis of ‘The Death of a Moth” Essay

Virginia Woolf is a British writer born in 1882 and she died a horrific conclusion in 1941. She jumped unto River Ouse wearing an overcoat make full with rocks. She committed suicide as she was depressed and has a pessimistic belief towards life due to a mental illness she has been cursed with. She wrote The death of the Moth in 1942. This act contains a wide variety of rhetorical devices that makes it intriguing. Although the seek is short, she wrote a detailed story with an underlying metaphor. In this non-fictional essay, she effectively conveys her ideas by means of the use of figurative language.She uses an extend metaphor in which the moth symbolizes mercifuls in the way it lives its life. The essay entraps the reader into the outgoing struggle of our own mortality. end-to-end the essay, the reader becomes aware of the tragedy that all life has to offer and that is the ineluctable death. The theme is not lucid in the beginning. But in the latter(prenominal) part of t he essay, one can deduce that the moth actually symbolizes humans and life. In the essay, she illustrates the struggle between life and death.Her purpose in writing this passing play is to depict how pathetic life is in the face of death, and to garner applaud for the awesome effect that death has over life. Throughout the essay, death is set forth from many different angles. The purpose of this is to remind us of the power that death has over life. She shows us the death is certain and unavoidable. She does not convey this centre with logic, but with instead with emotions, feelings, and implicit ideas. She makes us feel the death of the moth to comport us a more complete understanding of the eternal power of death.She uses several different types of figurative and literary language. As mentioned earlier, the essay is an extended metaphor. She used simile several times. For example, until it looked as if a vast net income with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air. In this simile, she describes a company of crows in the trees outside her window. In addition, she uses parallelism, which occurs when she writes That was all he could do, in transgress of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. A good example of exaggeration is present when the author describes One could only watch the extraordinary causal agency made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submersed an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings By using such a simple creatures struggle against death as a metaphor, Woolf creates a beautiful essay on the fragility of life. Her simplicity and detail keeps her essay from becoming overcomplicated, also dramatic, or depressing. It was a surprisingly light and meaningful essay on an event that most people would probably overlook.