It was really interesting and enlightening to look at other people’s common place book entries. It brought other perspectives and focuses into my learning and made me think about parts of the book I hadn’t thought of previously. The three people I commented on all focused on different aspects of the novel from the author to the content to the themes behind the novel. They can all be tied together though because Wilde took themes and feelings from his own life and wrote them in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

My favorite common place entry from the ones I looked at was Peyton’s quotation from Dangerous Books. He mentioned a very thought provoking quotation from Oscar Wilde who said the characters in the novel represent different aspects of himself. It also reflects Basil’s statement that he couldn’t display the portrait he had made of Dorian Gray because he had put too much of himself in it. It makes me wonder if Oscar Wilde had a similar struggle when he thought about publishing the novel.

All of the graphic content was interesting to look at because they were all depicting a similar thing, Dorian and his portrait, but they had different ways of doing it. Mariah and I had images that were depicting a similar scene in the novel, but they looked very different. Going along a similar line, Caitlyn focused on the themes of ethics and aesthetics which can be visually depicted through the images Mariah and I found.

My biggest question after looking at all the different common place book entries is whether Oscar Wilde had a similar struggle to Basil when he was planning on publishing his book? How much of himself did he put in his novel similar to how Basil put himself in his portrait?