THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY by Oscar Wilde
SETTING: Victorian London\ XIX century
PLOT: Basil Hallward, one of Dorian Gray's friends, gives him a picture of him as a gift. The 'Dorian Gray' of the picture is a young, good-looking boy who Dorian starts to envy. So he stipulates a 'pact with the devil': the picture would have aged in his stead and the real Dorian always young. Seeing the boy in the picture to age always more also because of his worst actions, Dorian hides the picture. One day, all hot about regretes and frights, he stabs the picture, breaks the spell and it's like if he has killed himself. His servants find him dead with a dagger stabbed.
CHARACTERS: Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward (painter), Lord Henry Wotton, Sybil Vane (fiancèe)
NARRATOR: third person
POINT OF VIEW: Dorian's
THEMES: desire for being young for ever, guilt, frights, cruelty in killing people
STYLE: words express what feelings Oscar Wilde wanted to communicate
PERSONAL COMMENT: this book gives a moral: Dorian Gray was too attached to beauty even to desire for being young for ever. It was his picture to change, to age and show his inner changes. In fact the picture became worse with changes inside him, those are the worst ones. So we have to worry about our deep rather than our beauty because this is going to disappear one day. Otherwise we won't able to accept our inner changes and we'll kill ourselves.
-Chiara Manicone
RispondiEliminaI really liked this book because of the unusual theme: the destructive power of the beauty.
I especially liked this sentence: “I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” This quote is important because the protagonist, thanks to the portrait, could enjoy his life without having bad consequences of his bad behaviors on his body and face. but the emotions have to be approved by the conscience, and this is the problem in Dorian Gray’s life. So the moral lesson of Oscar Wilde is that you don’t have to live for your body and ephemeral pleasures because these pleasures could destroy your conscience.
ALESSANDRA PORCARI
I loved this book. I read it in Italian, too. I was fascinated by the unusual end, because i Didn't expect an end like this. I liked the themes and the characters and the different personalities of the different people that are described in the book. Dorian, instead of being with sweet and good people, followed bad people and so he destroyed himself and his life.
RispondiEliminaCORETTI EMANUELA