The extract is the last part of the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. There are three sequences and there is a third person omniscient narrator. The portrait is the symbolic representation of Dorian’s unconscious. In first sequence, Dorian Gray commits the murder. He kills the portraits, therefore he kills himself (the portrait is his soul) with a knife. The knife reminds to Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Bildungsroman and it shows to the reader the character comes to an end.

In the second sequence Oscar Wilde describes the external world using an onomatopoeic use of language of sense impressions.

Two gentlemen found the corpse of Dorian Gray with a knife plunged in his chest. In fact, when Dorian kills himself by trying to destroy the painting, the picture and the man once again trade appearances. The man in the portrait becomes young and beautiful, while the real Dorian becomes old and disfigured by guilt. Dorian has unwittingly realized the fear he had upon first seeing the painting: that he would wither and die, while the painting would remain young and beautiful forever. Furthermore, since the painting has been restored to its original appearance, the masterpiece of Basil Hallward is returned to the world. Dorian, seeing the knife, thinks that "As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work" (177), but the work and the painter are instead granted the immortality of artistic greatness, while Dorian himself is destroyed.