Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. An analysis with Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Philologie), course: Academic skills, language: English, abstract: Christopher Booker argues in his book The Seven Basic Plots - Why we tell stories that there is a number of plots which are fundamental to the way we tell stories (Booker 6) and that every single storyline is constructed of one of the seven predetermined plot developments. Booker characterizes each of the possible plots roughly and then states that there cannot be any story that differs from one of these patterns. The author then goes even further. He states that every plot actually runs through the same five stages, which he calls meta-plot (Booker 157). In other words C. Booker demonstrates how to analyze the plot of a story by classifying it into the category it fits in and then subdividing its different stages. But does his concept really work for any story? Is it possible to categorize a book into one of Bookers seven plots and to subdivide its plot into the five stages of Bookers meta-plot afterwards? In order to question whether his theory works for different stories this work deals with the analysis of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde according to C. Bookers scheme of the Seven Basic Plots.