Death Of The Moth Rhetorical Analysis

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Virginia Woolf is an author concerned with capturing moments of excitement, pain, beauty, and horror. In her piece “The Death of the Moth” she sees a fragile moth struggling to live, and records its undergoing pain using a personal writing style. In her essay, “The Death of the Moth”, Woolf uses her “stream of consciousness” style to appeal to emotion through her vivid word choice and sentence structure. Foremost, Woolf creates a build up of her emotions and alterations in her vivid word choice to assist her in conveying her purpose. She began her essay with a formal and relaxed tone, as she described the benignant September morning. Her syntax consists of detailed compound-complex sentences, and diction, all with positive connotations, …show more content…
In the beginning of her essay she adds similes to help the reader connect his or her own life to the text. Correspondingly, she states, “Soaring round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands on black knots in it had been cast up into the air” (P. 1). The narrator adds similes to her piece to help the reader visualize vivid images of what he or she is reading. The narrator continues to add figurative language, as she uses personification to describe death. She depicts death as, “A power of such magnitude” (P. 6). Woolf uses personification to ignite the power death has over life. In the same way, Woolf makes use of the Moth’s death as a metaphor to represent how death controls all species, including human beings, the most advanced being known to man. In effect, she does this to allow the reader to feel empathetic of death. In essence, her comparisons create the statement on the impermanence and privilege of having a life.
In her essay, “The Death of the Moth”, Woolf conveys her purpose of how death is stronger than the fragility of life using the life cycle of a diminutive moth. Through her “stream of consciousness” writing style Woolf appeals to despairing emotions by asserting creative word choice and sentence
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