The Moths in the Red Room

The Moths

Moths are quite disgusting animals. They are often seen as gross, colourless creatures that are a pest.

The moths in the Red Room fill the room with a gloomy, eerie sense of death and rotting. The moths symbolise the sense of death and depression. The grandfather also resembled a moth before he died, "All he looks like,' Edmund Hooper said,'is one of his dead old moths." p11, the grandfather's skin was dead, colourless and pealing, "Everything about him was bleached and grey-ish white." p11. Edmund is a very insensitive child, he has no respect for his grandfather. "Bleached and grey-ish white" and "one of his old dead moths" exaggerate how bad, ugly and almost dead the grandfather looks. 

The moths symbolise death. The grandfather, when nearly dead, resembled the moths, colourless, pealing skin and quite gross. The moths also give off a sense of depression as they died just to fulfill a colector's needs.