The death of the Moth, by Virginia Woolf, is a narrative essay in which she writes about the wretched

and pitiful moth’s death. The essay symbolizes the short life of moth that corresponds with the real
nature of life and death. She is moved by the moth’s struggle and fight against the death and personified
the moth by attributing it human pronoun “him”.

The author starts the essays by calling moths not the true moths as they don’t give the true sense of
‘dark autumn’ and ‘ivy-blossom’ to her. She calls them hybrid creature which doesn’t completely
resemble the butterflies nor their own ancestral species. Despite its hybrid nature, the moth catches the
author’s attention. It also starts with charming, elegant phrases, “It was a pleasant morning, mid-
September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months”. But the style
promptly changes when the chief sign of death heralds. Throughout the essay, death is defined in
various ways. All of the ways portrays death as the most influential power. “Failure and awkwardness”
personified the death when the moth signaled “the approach of death”. The last words of the author are
extremely powerful. She explains the true nature of the universe and people living in it. No one care
about you struggle in life, or how much you fight against death to survive, yet everyone sympathizes
with life. Similarly, no one cares about the moth and his struggle against death. According to Woolf, the
moth struggle for that life which no one valued, desired or want to keep. This difference in attitude,
according to Woolf, moves one strangely.

An interesting theme is being brought to an extraordinary piece of literature by Virginia Woolf, in which
she utilized ‘Life and Death’ as the grand theme, which being written in the form of a story of a moth’s
death. This essay has a first person point of view, in which the speaker witness the moth’s struggle to
escape her windowpane, before eventually death came and took its life.

Throughout the essay, we can acknowledge the speaker’s visceral thoughts about her surroundings, at
first when she sees the moth, she recognizes that moth as a very emaciated creature is living its life to
its fullest let’s say, reaching and extending its boundary as it flies around. The speaker, then realizes that
the moth is a metaphor of life, as she continues to observe and drown in her own thoughts, as it is
written

“He was little or nothing but life”.

In this part, the speaker reflects the life of a moth through life itself, as she soon pity how the moth is
just a diminutive creature that is incapable of making a different in this vast world, so it is useless.
Additionally, the speaker’s fascination of life is truly remarkable, by the way she cherishes her
surroundings and the beauty behind them.

The writer succeed in using the point of view in emphasizing her point because it gives a message that
will remain in mind. This message was indicate through the metaphor of the moth, portrays the real
nature of the universe and the people living around. No one cares about you until you are dead. No one
care how much you struggle against the death but all they care if you are alive. Woolf is a keen observer
and throughout the essay by observing the moth creates the true picture of life and death and the
struggle one has to do to survive. The struggle is only useful until the token of death is not shown. Once
the death heralds, nothing has control over it just as she is powerless and helpless to the moth. The
Death of the Moth compares the insignificant short struggle and life of a moth to the daily struggles of
human life. Moth as a symbol of human and it relates to human’s struggle to survive and how human
will encounter death as well. When we encounter death, we become the same creature, no matter what
our status in the world before. Hence, nobody can escape death, it’s inevitable and unescapable.