After the death of Sibyl Vane, Lord Henry sends Dorian Gray a book that so rapidly consumes him that he begins to blur the lines between fiction and reality. About the book and Dorian’s perception of it, Wilde writes, “The hero, the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the romantic temperament and the scientific temperament were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it” (Wilde 91). Through Lord Henry’s book, Dorian finds a connection between the beautiful hero’s story and his own. He begins to act like the hero in the book, but with the caveat that unlike the hero, Dorian’s own looks go untarnished. Without fully realizing it, Lord Henry, who is often so quick to advise Dorian, teaches him how to behave through his book. In a similar vein, John Addington Symonds in his work “A Problem in Greek Ethics” writes about the Dorians, an ancient Greek peoples, “… The lover taught, the hearer learned; and so from man to man was handed down the tradition of heroism, the peculiar tone and temper of the state to which, in particular among the Greeks, the Dorians clung with obstinate pertinacity” (Symonds). Lord Henry, who loves Dorian, provides him with a role-model, the hero of the book, and Dorian latches onto it unceasingly.

Through Dorian’s name, Oscar Wilde creates a connection between the character and the ancient Greeks, and this connection is only strengthened with the addition of Lord Henry’s teachings. Dorian looks upon the book Lord Henry gives him as a document of his own life. He takes Symonds’ idea about the Dorians and brings it a step further, to the point that instead of merely learning from it, Dorian lives his life as art. This imitation comes directly after Sibyl’s death, a scene that Dorian relates as “her finest tragedy” (Wilde 75), which already shows his inability to distinguish between reality and art. He becomes a character in his own life, and as he becomes more and more engrossed in his own story he alienates those around him.