In compelling contrast, symptoms and symbols of Van Gogh’s obsession with death dominate the composition of The Starry Night, painted in June of 1889. The same swirling, variegated brush strokes in nearly identical colors make up the ground and sky, giving both the same qualities of tangibility, and therefore making both equally probable environs for existence. Additionally, in contrast with the composition of Van Gogh’s works from Arles, the stars here dwarf the lights of men, with huge swirling haloes of bright yellows, in contrast to the tiny spots of muted gold that represent the gas lights of the town. Van Gogh began to realize and address the idea that, in the immortal words of Chuck Palaniuk, “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero� (Palahniuk 17). The infinite now asserts itself over men: Van Gogh acknowledges his own mortality as well as that of all men, and the fact that, in the end, we, in all our mortality, cannot hope to be anything more than a tiny streak of dim gold when compared to the immortal stars. The explosive growth of the stars between the Starry Night Over the Rhone, which Van Gogh painted at Arles, and the one painted at Saint-Rémy goes beyond a comparison of mortality and the immortal, however. Marc Edo Tralbaut writes in Vincent Van Gogh that Van Gogh, by this time, had “begun to feel that there was some intangible association between stars and death� (Tralbaut 282). In fact, Van Gogh saw more than the “intangible association� that Tralbaut writes of, writing to Theo that “just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star� (qtd Welsh-Ovcharov 205). So, in addition to lording their infinity over the mortality of humankind, the magnitude of the stars represents the magnitude of thoughts of death in Van Gogh’s life, as the association for him between stars and death was concrete.
The stars, however, are not the only obvious and prominent symbol of death that Van Gogh painted into The Starry Night as an expression of his fear. Perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of the composition is the large cypress tree in the left foreground, which also dwarfs the distant town. Cypresses also had a strong association with death; Welsh-Ovcharov writes that the cypress embodies “an undercurrent of death, deriving from the Mediterranean association of cypresses and cemeteries� (Welsh-Ovcharov 241) Considering this, to put a cypress stretching up toward the stars is a clear enough symbol, and one that Van Gogh certainly considered consciously. Welsh-Ovcharov goes on to speculate that “Van Gogh’s identification of the cypress with ‘an Egyptian obelisk’ reveals a wistful hope for immortality� (Welsh-Ovcharov 241). This, however, is a lacking evaluation. Van Gogh did equate cypresses with Egyptian obelisks, calling them “as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk� (Letter 596). It is more understandable in the context, however, that this was a reference not to immortal life but to death, for obelisks were used to commemorate the passing of important personages in ancient Egypt. The cypresses, then, are one symbol or manifestation of the obsession with death that Van Gogh worked into his paintings throughout his time at Saint-Rémy. He wrote of the cypresses that they were “always occupying my thoughts� (Letter 596), as many images of death were at the time.