Insignificant

Seeing as Virginia Woolf struggled with depression throughout her entire adult life, it doesn't come as  much of a surprise that she would compare human life to the insignificant life of a moth. Her essay, "The Death of the Moth" would be classified as a subjective piece written about the objectivity of death.  When I first read the essay, I believed it was about relating her struggles in life to the moth's meaningless efforts to live. I now see that, on the contrary, she is referring to humans and how insignificant they are in both life and death. Our life, like that of the moth, is pointless "dancing and zigzagging." We flutter from class to class, stressing about grades, college, and our future. These are things which, in the grand scheme of things, are completely irrelevant. If an outsider were to come and look at us as the human population, they would probably see us in the same light as we see moths: frivolous and worthless.
As the essay (and the moth's life) reaches an end, Woolf employs a use of shorter and shorter sentences, to show the sense of urgency the moth feels as he is struggling to hang on to his unimportant life. Woolf gives her audience a hint that the essay is about humans by personifying the moth in the very last sentence of her piece: "O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am." By giving the moth human characteristics, Woolf is able to convey her claim that human life is insignificant.