The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray By Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel written by Irish writer, Oscar Wilde. The main character, rich and beautiful Dorian Gray, owns his portrait, which instead of him becomes older and where are traces of sin and mistakes. While Gray becomes uncontrollable and ruthless, his appearance stays youthful and flawless. At the end, in his despair, Gray destroys the picture and himself. The novel gives us a very good lesson – we can do whatever we want, but time is more powerful than us, which means that one day, everybody of us will have to say goodbye to this world.
The novel begins with discussion about beauty. Basil Hallward (the artist) and his friend Lord Henry have different thoughts about it. Basil is sensitive artist who is painting the portrait of a young man of the immense beauty. They also talked about life in general, where Lord mentioned that beauty is the only thing that matters and Basil thinks that only stupid and ugly people live the best. Basil accidentally mentioned Dorian Gray, the name of his male muse. He was completely inspirated of him. Gray was an innocente, shy and moral boy who came from rich family.
He represented an ideal of male beauty. When Lord met him, he made a strong influence on him that dramatically changed his life. He was a strong hedonist, full of ideas. His philosophical thoughts made strong influences on Dorian that in one moment completely changed his life. After the painting was finished, Basic gave it to Dorian and he fell in love with it. He wished that never grows old. As the story goes on, something unexpected happened. The painting started to change, it was becoming uglier and uglier.
Dorian was growing older, but only on the painting. It means that from the day he got that painting, he started living double life. He decided not to tell anybody about his secret. Everything started when he came back home from the cinema. He had a conflict with his fiancee, about eighteen years old Sybil who was an actress in a low budget theatre. She realized that all the time she was living in a lie and decided to play poorly on her last show. Dorian became dissapointed and also embarassed in front of Basil and Henry.
Her only knowledge of love was love of theatre. Unfortunately, Dorian decided to break up with her. His decision broke her heart and she commited suicide. As the time went on, Dorian still stayed a young man and did not change. The saddest moment of the story is when he killed Basil. His conscience started to chase him, and he grabbed the same knife to kill him and destroy his painting. At the end of the story, Dorian killed himself. The servants hardly recognized him. All sins he did during his life, were moved from the painting to his dead body.
