When Dorian Gray locks his picture in a secret room, he has already become a portrait, the one painted by Basil Hallward, which has a superhuman taste of immortality.  But how can a human being become a portrait?  Basil is definitely not described by Oscar Wilde as a symbolic creator but rather as a meek idealistic.  Lord Henry, on the other hand, is not convincing as a corrupter or malefic influence on Gray.  People argue that movies with violence are dangerous to young minds, yet rarely are children affected in their moral behavior by such movies.  Some psychologists might disagree, but common sense and observation do not supply us with countless examples of people corrupted by visions, talk or hearsay; they rather offer us exceptions.

        The reader may deem that the changes in the picture in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray live only in Gray's imagination until Basil confirms the former's viewpoint.  Could it be possible that Gray himself unconsciously and pathologically changed the painting as the years went by?  The answer to this question lies partly in the genre of the novel.  A realistic work would involve a rational explanation to the changes in the painting while a more symbolic plot, closer to the blurry veracity of the short story, would draw us more to an interpretation of the given supernatural events.

        Whether the novel is mysterious or symbolic, it appears like a parody of a bildungsroman, wherein the young Dorian decides to follow a certain course of life, which is only alluded to and implied in the novel by unreliable gossip, and pursues it invariably with no development of the mind, represented by the absence of any physical change in his face.  Yet his apparent youth is not marvelously regarded, except by a few, and Dorian seems accepted in a certain social circle that is not too sensitive to rumors.  The changes in the painting are important only to Dorian Gray because he needs to feel that something is changing in his life, but he is unable to escape the unease of boring continuity.   When a focus is made by Wilde on age and aging rather than all the events that go in between, one feels that his protagonist conveys an existential perception of life.   Gray is afraid to die – he is happy to know that Sybil Vane's brother has been accidentally shot and cannot hunt him – but finds it difficult to color life with a moral or aesthetic tincture.  He is curious to find the changes in the picture because this is the sole evolution in his life that carries some meaning.   Pathetically, his expectations relate to a painting.  And his only means of escaping the empty circle in which he is imprisoned is by committing suicide.

        Sybil Vane dies for love.  Dorian Gray would have wished to die for such a noble cause.  His end is so inglorious that it is his wrinkled face that is found lying in the secret room, rather than his superficially fresh complexion.  But the reader feels little pity for Gray since he has killed Basil for no valid reason.  He can make his friend's body disappear but not his own anguish with respect to life.  It is not men's justice that can condemn him but his own.  But even in his moral arrogance, he is unheroic.   He dies during a ludicrous struggle with a portrait.