“The picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde: the plot structure

The subject of the article - analysis of the deep plot structure of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde. The main theme - discovering the early literary and mythological prototypes of the plot structure of "The Picture of Dorian Gray", which goes back, in particular, to Homer's "Odyssey", Virgil's "Aeneid" as well as to a story about Mitius of Argos told by Aristotle. Methodology - the structural and comparative-historical research method is applied. Results - an invariant archetypical plot structure has been discovered in various texts, where a character of the work of art plays a role of a spectator who is watching the events of his own life portrayed in the other work of art which, in its turn, is a constituent part of the first one. The article demonstrates that the plot structure of Wilde's novel implicitly reproduces the archetypal revenge plot described by Aristotle in his "Poetics". A pplication of results - literary studies and literary theory. Conclusion: the discovered structural identity of the hidden plot design in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and a number of classical texts confirms a hypothesis about the existence of basic plots called archetypes by C.G.Jung, i.e. the fundamental universal structures which are unconsciously reproduced in different cultures and epochs.