Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Elements of rhetoric
Literary criticism example
Virginia woolf's essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The subject of death is one that many have trouble talking about, but Virginia Woolf provides her ideas in her narration The Death of the Moth. The moth is used as a metaphor to depict the constant battle between life and death, as well as Woolf’s struggle with chronic depression. Her use of pathos and personification of the moth helps readers develop an emotional connection and twists them to feel a certain way. Her intentional use of often awkward punctuation forces readers to take a step back and think about what they just read. Overall, Woolf uses these techniques to give her opinion on existence in general, and reminds readers that death is a part of life.
Woolf’s pathos to begin the story paints a picture in readers minds of what the
…show more content…
She describes the September morning as “mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than the summer months.” She then goes on to describe the field outside her window, using word choice that is quite the opposite of words that would be used to describe a depressing story. She depicts the exact opposite of death, and creates a feeling of joy, happiness, and life to the world outside her room. After this, she goes into great detail about the “festivities” of the rooks among the treetops, and how they “soared round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air”. There is so much going on around her that “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book.” Descriptions like these are no way to describe a seemingly depressing story about a moth, but by using these, joyful descriptions, Woolf connects everything happening outside to a single strand of energy. These images set a lively tone for the world around her, and now allow her to further introduce the moth into the story.
One article article analyzing The Death of the Moth writes: “With the use of the pronoun “he,” we see how Woolf anthropomorphizes the moth, and in that vein she continues the metamorphosis… He is not just a representative of a species; he is an individual” (Dubino). By changing her description from moths in general to this single moth, Woolf has created a subject that can be given human-like thoughts and feelings. She refers to the moth as “he” throughout the rest of the essay to personify
Both Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are extremely gifted writers. Virginia Woolf in 1942 wrote an essay called The Death of the Moth. Annie Dillard later on in 1976 wrote an essay that was similar in the name called The Death of a Moth and even had similar context. The two authors wrote powerful texts expressing their perspectives on the topic of life and death. They both had similar techniques but used them to develop completely different views. Each of the two authors incorporate in their text a unique way of adding their personal experience in their essay as they describe a specific occasion, time, and memory of their lives. Woolf’s personal experience begins with “it was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months” (Woolf, 1). Annie Dillard personal experience begins with “two summers ago, I was camping alone in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” (Dillard, 1). Including personal experience allowed Virginia Woolf to give her own enjoyable, fulfilling and understandable perception of life and death. Likewise, Annie Dillard used the personal narrative to focus on life but specifically on the life of death. To explore the power of life and death Virginia Woolf uses literary tools such as metaphors and imagery, along with a specific style and structure of writing in a conversational way to create an emotional tone and connect with her reader the value of life, but ultimately accepting death through the relationship of a moth and a human. While Annie Dillard on the other hand uses the same exact literary tools along with a specific style and similar structure to create a completely different perspective on just death, expressing that death is how it comes. ...
I chose this word because the tone of the first chapter seems rather dark. We hear stories of the hopes with which the Puritans arrived in the new world; however, these hopes quickly turned dark because the Purtains found that the first buildings they needed to create were a prison, which alludes to the sins they committed; and a cemetery, which contradicts the new life they hoped to create for themselves.
Thesis: Glaspell utilized the image of a bird to juxtapose/compare/contrast the death of Mrs. Wright’s canary to the death of Mrs. Wright’s soul.
In his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger uses connotative diction along with the red hunting cap to characterize the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, as a uniquely defensive introvert. For instance, In chapter three, Holden’s red cap that he wears in private to express his individuality, is addressed for the first time when Ackley enters the room with demeaning statements in regard to the hat, which is meant for hunting. This triggers Holden to retort, “Like hell it is,” (page 22) which is his defensive instinct, compelling him to verbalize his anger as a form of protection. As a follow-up statement, he cleverly says,“This is a people shooting hat. . .” (page 22) connotatively revealing much more about Holden as
From the day that J.D. Salinger published his book “The Catcher in the Rye”, it has maintained its title as one of the most controversial books on the shelf. Society has taken the poor elements such as prostitution and under-aged drinking and used it to ban the book in many schools and libraries. Whether or not reading this book has any importance to youth has been the greatest argument for most of society. The book compiles many underlying issues in teenager’s lives and the main character Holden very bluntly acknowledges them. Holden also calls out the phoniness that most adults participate in around others.The book's status as inappropriate and unimportant has been argued for and against since the book was written. Through Salinger’s use
When one commits a sin, there are typically many external consequences that follow. Some people also find themselves having internal conflicts due to feeling regretful for engaging in their wrongdoing. In Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Amir commits a sin that results in him severing a brotherhood between him and his half brother and friend, Hassan. Due to the fact that Amir and Hassan had a very strong relationship growing up, it should have been implied that the boys would show each other undying loyalty. However, Amir neglects to defend Hassan on the day that he was raped. This decision to be a bystander instead of a hero leaves Amir with a heavy load of guilt that will not disappear. Luckily for him, he is given the opportunity to redeem
Pathos and logos are two techniques used in the following article. To pull the readers into the article The Solace of Oblivion, the reader uses the literary technique known as pathos. To start the article, the author Jeffrey Tobin wrote, “On October 31, 2006, an eighteen-year-old woman named Nikki Catsouras slammed her father’s sports car into the side of a concrete toll booth in Orange County, California. Catsouras was decapitated in the accident.” This is an issue that creates sympathy for the family of Nikki Catsouras and gets the reader to empathize and side with the argument in the article. With a lack of privacy due to the Internet, the right to be forgotten needs to be advocated and upheld in the United States,
In the forth paragraph it gives a description of bats that appeals to your sight and your touch. "Its little body is covered in fur, which many people find distressing, this is a creature that flies, and is unsettling for a flying thing to have fur" (Allen 4). The essay continues to go into detail about the bat describing its ears which appeals to ones sight. "Shaped just like a chihuahua's ears, only in miniature: tiny, perfect doggie ears, which do not belong on a flying thing"(Allen 5). The essay goes into extremedetail about the creatures found in nature and why they are not a benefit to you, when your considering living out in the woods. A final example that can be used is the description of birds coming into your home and not being able to get out causing noise and disress this appeals to your listening and sight. "Unlike bats, small birds that fly indoors by accident hardly ever find their way back outside on their own; they just keep wacking into plate - glass windows"(Allen
In the beginning of “The Death of the Moth” Woolf describes ”a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant” (193), the usual autumn day, with regular work on the field, rooks on the tree tops that looked like “a vast net with thousands of black knots” (194). The picture is calm, but rooks, symbol of death, bring dark color to it. Gradually, with the development of the events, when death starts winning over moth’s struggle to live, the image changes, “work in the fields had stopped” (195). Like in the slow-motion picture, everything becomes stiff. Woolf uses words “still”, “indifferent”, “impersonal” to increase a sense of despair. Author uses such an imagery to empower the hopelessness of the moment and to make the reader feel the futility of the life and death struggle.
Woolf utilizes the moth’s vivacity(Used Frequently) and desire to escape the boundaries that contain it in order to reiterate the point that no matter one’s concentrated efforts, the trepidation and obstacles one attempts to vanquish can never be truly overcome. In the narration, Woolf observes the activities of a day moth, struggling to escape from the imprisonment of the room, and searching for a route within proximity of the window. The author admires the vivacity of the moth and its ardent desire(used frequently) to leave the chains that bind it, yet pities the moth as an insignificant and ignorant being. Woolf, by employing the imagery of the window and the world beyond to represent the obstacles one faces and the objectives one strives for, restates that no mat...
Woolf had so many hardships in her adolescent years, that a single dark spot; such as, her being raped, got much worse when her half-sister passed. However, Woolf kept writing so she was able to find an out...
...Pinpointing the situation to a specific individual, while hypothetical, makes the reader feel as if the situation is personal, thus establishing Woolf’s pathos.
In her essay “The Death of the Moth”, Virginia Woolf encourages us to be inspired by the moth: to make the most of our lives until the very end, but not to fight death unnecessarily and to accept it with pride of having lived a meaningful life. Woolf conveys this message through symbolism, imagery and contrast.
In Annie Dillard’s essay, “Holy the Firm,” the author starts out by saying she lives on northern Puget Sound alone. She talks about a spider in her bathroom and the hollow bugs on the bathroom flow. Then she talks about her past summer where she camped alone in the mountains in Virginia. She geared up to read about a novel that made her want to become a writer when she was sixteen. She was hoping that reading the novel again would allow her to get that same feeling as before. So she read every day under a tree by a candle. Moths would fly into the candle, and one night a moth flew into a candle and got caught. Dillard noticed a “golden female moth” flapped into the fire and stuck (Dillard 6-7). Dillard continues on with the metaphor of the burning moth. By making this metaphor, Dillard talks about death. When you hear the word death, you might picture someone dying and that it just ends there. However, Dillard’s metaphor about death was not negative. In the text she states, “She burned for two hours without changing, without
The lyrical, flowing pattern of Woolf?s writing easily slides in and out of different characters? thoughts. Her ability to show the random yet patterned working of our minds gives us a realistic sense of mental time. Woolf?s sentences quickly cross the boundaries of the past, present, and future. She saw the writer?s task as ?being able to go beyond the `formal railway line of sentences? and to show how people feel or think or dream all over the place? (Lee 93). She wanted to express a point of view, not a plot. Her stream-of-consciousness writing allows us insight into a variety of characters. For example, within the first moments that we meet Clarissa, we rapidly travel between her present, her past, and her thoughts about the fu...