TPoDG ch. 16-18

"His meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered in the ruin of the young life was really to be laid at his door, as Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult.He bit his lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad. Yet, after all, what did it matter to him? One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it" (194).

Dorian is really conflicted with the idea that maybe he was the one at fault for ruining people. It is really strange that he accepts it to some degree, but then gets rid of the notion immediately. The picture "held the secret of his life, and told his story" (95). This should be enough proof of Dorian's influence over others. Each time he hurts someone, the picture changes. Should that not show that he has superb powers of manipulation? But he does not realize it, and that is both because he can not see it and because he does not want to see it. He tries to hide it from himself, but he is also blind to it. He had "that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished, and indeed exercised often without being conscious of it" (170). He could lure people in and change them, and he does not want to admit that to neither himself nor anyone else, and so he lets out his frustration when people call him out on it by doing terrible things, like when he killed Basil.

"He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high indifference of joy" (207).

At first it seems as if Dorian has turned over a new leaf; as though he has decided to be a better person. I believe he has only suddenly become so attentive to such happy things because he was afraid of death. He was terrified of being killed by Jim, who had realized that Dorian really was the one who led to Sibyl's death: "'They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. It's nigh on eighteen years since I met him'" (197). Jim, filled with hatred for his sister's killer, has come back to get Dorian. He thinks his death is coming, and, like all people who feel their death is coming, changes. Dorian was feeling, "sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself" (205). He did not care much for life, which is Harry's influence, and yet he did not want to die, which seems to be a lingering influence of Basil. Basil's death, in its own way, was good for Dorian, and has made him more in tune with life, and the want to continue living.