Response Paper: A Chase And The Death Of a Moth

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Response Paper: A Chase and The Death of a Moth The themes of these two books are far apart and at the same time closely related. A Chase shows the story of a girl’s rite of passage into adulthood by facing on a man who challenges her core as an athlete by chasing her up and down around her neighborhood. It thrills the reader into wondering whether or not she’ll be caught and in her inevitable capture whether she’ll survive or not. The Death of a Moth is a story of Virginia Woolf’s thoughts and interpretation of death through the symbolism of a dying and withering moth that has caught flame. The Death of a Moth also pushes beyond the metaphor of death by going into acceptance of the Moth’s death. While both stories stick true to their themes, both stories are intertwined in more ways than one. Upon capture in A Chase, the author describes how she would have “died happy, for nothing has required so much of me…” which in itself is a form of acceptance. The Moth is a metaphor for Virginia Woolf’s eagerness for death and her fight against depression. Virginia herself drowned herself by placing stones in her pockets and drowning herself. In both stories the authors feel weak in some way, shape or form. In A Chase, the author is placed in a position where she will inevitably lose to a man who is equally as quick and her once striving ego starts diminishing upon realizing that he’s going to catch her. In The Death of a Moth, Virginia felt pity for the moth because of how insignificant and small the moth was compared to death. Both stories are significantly different but both run the themes of death, acceptance and presentable
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