How does dorian gray died

Dorian blames the portrait which has grown old instead of him and in the moment of anger, he tries to destroy it. The portrait is the mirror of all his sins and evil deeds. By destroying the picture, he believes, he will erase his past. The picture is his own soul, part of his personality. Dorian sees two ways of solving his situation: either to admit his sins or to destroy them. Too proud as he was, he decided to choose second option and to erase and forget his own past.

Destroying a portrait, he destroys himself. The question is why did the writer decide that Dorian has to die? What is the justification of his death? 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.

On the floor is the body of an old man, horribly wrinkled and disfigured, with a knife plunged into his heart. Now that Dorian has actually lived the philosophy that Lord Henry so eloquently champions, however, he stands as proof of the limitations—indeed, even the misguided notions—of that philosophy. By keeping himself free from sin, even as he argues the virtues of sinning, Lord Henry lacks the terrible awareness of guilt and its debilitating effects.

At this stage, however, not even truthful self-awareness is enough to save Dorian. The discrepancy between the enormity of his crimes and this minor act of contrition is too great.

Furthermore, he realizes that he does not want to confess his sins but rather have them simply go away. The portrait reflects this hypocrisy and drives him to his final, desperate act. He decides it is better to destroy the last evidence of his sin—the painting of his soul—than face up to his own depravity.

The depravity he seeks to destroy is, in essence, himself; therefore, by killing it, he kills himself. A Tale of Two Cities Dr. He slashes at it with a knife appropriately the very same knife with which he murdered his ex-friend, Basil Hallward , hoping to do away with the evidence of his crimes.

But the plan backfires dramatically: by stabbing the portrait, Dorian inadvertently kills himself. The grotesque deformities of the picture come into being in Dorian's own body, while painted Dorian is restored to its original image of spotless beauty. In the end, Dorian gets everything that was coming to him; his choices brought about his own doom.

Questions like "Why? What really matters about it is not its fairy-tale-gone-wrong turn of events, but rather the message that it conveys. The idea here is that nobody can get away with everything; even though Dorian thought that he could dodge earthly punishment and go about his evil business by destroying the portrait the proof of how vile and corrupt he really was , his death actually comes as a kind of divine retribution for all of his crimes.