Disaster in Bloom: Abhimanyu’s Death, Epic Simile, and Narrative Meaning in the Mahābhārata

This paper offers a rhetorical-narratological analysis of the death of Abhimanyu in the Mahābhārata, combining close reading of epic similes with attention to narrative sequencing and discourse-level strategies within the Droṇa Parvan. It focuses on passages describing Abhimanyu's entry into and death within the cakravyūha, examining how the episode is shaped through recurring imagery of light, fire, and luminous motion. The text consistently associates the young hero with radiance, upward movement, and vital intensity; following his death, it shifts to images of decline, including comparisons to an extinguished light or a fallen celestial body. Rather than presenting death as simple annihilation, this patterned contrast participates in a rhetorical structuring of meaning in which rupture and continuity remain in tension. Particular attention is given to the simile comparing Abhimanyu's entry into battle to a moth drawn into fire. Within a rhetorical-narratological framework, such similes are not treated as ornamental embellishments but as integral components of narrative communication that guide ethical and affective response. Their meaning emerges through repetition, placement, and interaction with surrounding narrative discourse, shaping the reader's perception of heroic agency, vulnerability, and inevitability. The paper argues that Abhimanyu's death functions as a rhetorically constructed moment of acute emotional and ethical disruption, particularly in relation to kṣatriya norms of warfare and collective violence. This disruption is not resolved but rhetorically reconfigured through subsequent narrative framing, which invites the audience to negotiate the meaning of violence, responsibility, and heroic loss. The analysis shows how the Mahābhārata employs patterned imagery and simile as rhetorical devices to produce meaning without fully stabilising it, thereby sustaining interpretive tension within the epic discourse.