THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

OSCAR WILDE

COMPREHENSION

1             Dorian Gray tries to “make themselves perfect by the world existed”. He likes to live in luxury and to show his richness: he opens to “the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians..”. He likes perfection and order. “To him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts”.

2             For him the greatest of arts is Life; all the others are only the preparation of life.

3             Because he is a “type that was to combine something of real culture of the scholar with all grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen world”.

4             “The of the sense” represents Dorian Gray's point of view. Men is afraid of sensations; they feels a natural instinct of terror about passion because they are associated to “less highly organized forms of existence”.

5             The principles of a “new Hedonism that was to re-create life, to save it from that harsh, uncomely Puritanism that is having its curious revival”.

INTERPRETATION

1. Oscar Wilde uses a third person, omniscient narrator who presents the story. The narrator knows everything what happens including what each character is feeling and thinking.
2. “But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment”.
3. Walter Pater expresses the same concept of Life in his collection of essays. Particularly he says: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life”. Oscar Wilde quotes him in the last paragraph: “Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be”.