Theme Of Conscience In The Picture Of Dorian Gray

can be excused because people live for the sake of living. A conscience becomes a separate set of rules determined by each individual to please them. The murderer thinks murder is okay and the normal person doesn’t. Living with a conscience relative to personal desires and not living without a conscience (when it is defined as a set of predefined and commonly accepted values) is the same thing. To understand why living without a conscience is bad, or a trained one at least, it is first vital to know what a conscience is. Conscience is “when judgement remains though reason is forgotten” (Voland 251). A conscience is a vast set of values, stances, and/or premeditated decisions to hypothetical situation. A person has to address their conscience

The Picture of Dorian Gray could really be called: The Picture of Dorian’s Soul. The novel explores what occurs to a man who in the face of having to make the choice of his life of standing for something, chooses wrong, destroy his soul, and according to the Christian belief damns it to hell. He does this by abandoning his trained conscience because he listens to a deceitful influence that instills in the man’s belief system the idea that pleasing society is a worthless endeavor, it is because of the novel’s similarities to other works of literary merit with this story arch that it is allegorical. Otherwise Wilde would have crossed a line into a very literal piece with less depth to the meaning simply because of his outright and unapologetic call-it-what-it-is style. After all Dorian’s soul is very literally personified as an object in the novel, unlike other novels where the soul is represented by some object or other. Like Foster puts it in How to Read Literature Like a Professor the state of the soul is often represented by things like the weather, “It’s never just rain or snow” (150) because the soul is rarely out of the body like in Wilde’s