Day of the Butterfly by Alice Munro

Red Dress by Alice Munro

The Badness Within Him by Susan Hill

*The Study Notes postings are a work in progress and will be updated over time to cover works read over the 1st year (Moments of Madness, Somehow Tenderness Survives, Plath, Poe, Picture of Dorian Gray).  Do visit the blog for updates.

Take two. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Class orals (A)

Enjoy,

Maria

p.s. Enjoy this too: If at first

Study Notes on The Bells (1849) , The Poem  

Links:

The Interactive Raven – fun to click away at while you read – glossary-as-you-go. No analysis.

Open forum – casual personal responses to the poem by different readers; may not be the most widely-accepted interpretations. Interesting to read, nonetheless.

The poem and the poet - For your own interest but remember the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ when doing literary analysis - Focus on what the WORK says i.e. pay attention to the NARRATOR/ SPEAKER, not what you thought the AUTHOR/POET meant or felt

Hope that you are all not stressed and concerned about the coming exams.

On my research about IB English A2 requirmentes particularly about how to write a Comparative Commentary and how to do an oral commentary I have found some useful links.

Maybe some of you will find it useful to, thus I decided to put it on the blog.

See you tomorrow in the English exam.

I wish you great success!

Tanja

Here are the links:

http://www.geocities.com/frankie_meehan/WritingAboutTexts.html

http://www.geocities.com/frankie_meehan/TextComment.htm

http://goto.glocalnet.net/ibweb/oral_commentary__english_a2.htm

http://s.spachman.tripod.com/IB/commentary.htm

written-task-info

english-a2-oral-commentary1

Maria

The end of Dorian Gray…

Dorian Gray is a character who leaves no one indifferent- whether you like him or not, you have to admit that he has a great influence on you.

This is a paradox because Dorian is the one influenced by everyone else, always representing a clay that shaped by the ‘superior’ ones.

After he loses the point of his life- the eternal youth, he dies in a mysterious way.

The mystery of his death can be correlated to the mystery of his entire life- the beauty he cares so much about, is it the physical beauty that he was seeking for, or was it the purity of his soul that kept him alive?

Probably both…

After he destroys the purity and innocence of his soul, the picture made by a person who was probably the only one who actually cared about him, becomes his greatest enemy and represents the source of his terror and fear.

At the end Dorian dies and it stays unclear whether he just destroyed the picture and in that way found freedom or he actually committed suicide.

The appropriate and the most logical ending of the story would be Dorian’s death in both ways caused by the act of him self destroying the picture.

The picture indeed represented Dorian- not only his physical appearance, the way he used to look like, but his soul, the person he represents to the world and him self.

Dorian’s greatest fear that the picture will stay forever young and that he will be the one who is going to be altered by time and life, became, surprisingly the thing which did not come true…

The picture changed together with Dorian because it was a mirror that reflected the inner Dorian, the essence of his life and being.

Dorian died when the picture died- the only thing that made alive killed him.

Does not matter how you call it- a suicide or a murder the point is that they both died in the same time.

There is no Dorian without the picture…

He who so desperately wanted to kill his past was killed by the past it self…

No one can erase the past, nor can hide from it because it would mean that we would erase and hide our selves.

Dorian tried and failed…

He lost him self…

‘He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.’

by Iris

A human without a past is not a human, so what would Dorian Gray be without it? Every living being has a background, a history. The past is the basic of existence. In an act of destroying the picture, which is a symbol of his past and a reflector of his soul, Gray destroys the basics of his existence. His life was built through his deeds that the picture reflects. The bond between Dorian and the portrait is unbreakable, because Dorian is a body and the portrait is a soul.

By choosing a second option, he signed his own death penalty. Dorian was too proud to admit evil inside of him in front of others. Afraid of public humiliation and despise, he commits a suicide unconsciously. His pride was the cause of his death, but, also, a cause of his spoiled life. In his own eyes he was above the others, and so he felt that he can’t let his reputation and his good name to disappear. He had almost everything he ever wanted: eternal youth and intellect. But, his soul was old and ugly. And that is the only thing he wasn’t proud of. Blinded with pride and desire to stay respected, Dorian doesn’t see that the only solution of this situation is his death. He can’t pay his sins by destroying the picture, or by hiding his past. No one can be young and beautiful forever without a paying the price. If he had gone to the court and admitted all crimes that he had committed, he might be alive, paying a price of lost freedom and reputation. Dorian couldn’t confess. The only thing he has left was pride; he didn’t want to give up of it.  

‘When they entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of  visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.’

‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ ends up with those few words about his probable death. It is not explicitly stated who is lying on the floor even though the reader has the impression that it is Dorian Gray. Considering that Dorian committed suicide then the question of the reason why remains. As the last scene shows there is not even clarity about his death it is possible to transmit this uncertainty to the question why he committed suicide. What did Dorian Gray bring to this decision to end up with his life in this particular moment?

As it is already mentioned that there certainly can not be found any definiteness about his death and its reason some attempts can be made to clarify the situation in which Dorian found himself.

Dorian’s problem which can be found in many other books such as in ‘Faust’ by Goethe is that he wants to turn the natural process of aging into an unnatural because of his strong desire of being eternally young and beautiful which is the biggest or even the only desire in his life. It goes  all around the interchange between two opposites in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. 

What confuses not only the reader, but Dorian Gray is that the character Basil supposed to be the ‘good’ person Basil, perhaps a representative of god, is one of the weakest persons in the story. As the reader expects the good side to win the battle in the end apparently the bad side succeeds. But the confusion between the two differently powerful sides may be one reason for Dorian to commit suicide.

Moreover, it is not only the confusion which leads him to the evil side of the life. It is also the potential which already lied deeply in him from the very beginning. His desire to be eternally young did not entirely come from Lord Henry, the representative of the evil side, even though he has more power over Dorian than Basil.

The interchange of the eternal beauty of the picture and his aging process in reality is one cause which leads to his death. But it also is the non-consideration of other values by Dorian Gray. By only looking at the term of beauty and relating it to youth he already makes a big mistake. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Dorian Gray dreams about an unrealistic universal beauty without taking in consideration that by aging the beauty does not necessarily need to pass. The advantages of growing older like maturing morally are not visible for him. Moreover, it is not only the desire and the dreaming about eternal youth, it is also the fear of aging and the loss of admiration from the society which would signify a decay in the society. He is not able to overcome this extreme fear that leads to the interchange of reality and the world of imagination. Therefore, he totally looses the necessary sense of morality to live in the reality. He dies an unnatural mysterious death because of his non-acceptance and non-understanding of the world.

One proverb says that although you don’t see the results of something which you are doing yet, you will get everything what you deserve one day. This goes well with the story of Dorian because his sins are at least not as obvious for him to be enough to stop him to be this kind of person which he is.  

Beauty is power, a smile is its sword. From Dorian Gray’s point of view beauty is power but this power which he only knows to use to influence people negatively murders him in the end. The knife, the mean to kill, is a metaphor for the power which he didn’t know how to control turned against him activated by the disappearing smile on the portrait.