“The pleasures of pursuit are greater than the thrill of the conquest” - In light of this statement, how far and in what ways do you agree with this view of TPODG

The pursuit of pleasures are shown to be greater than the thrill of the conquest in the novel’s pervading sense of hedonistic means experienced mainly by Lord Henry and Dorian Gray. This however was influenced to begin with by the contextual background provided by the aesthetic movement, a backbone of Victorian society at the time. A sense of the pursuit of pleasure is provided by Basil’s comment to Lord Henry in Chapter I, “You never do a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.” This sense of acts without morality show a hedonistic pleasure in simply doing an act, not what is gained, or lost, from it. The paradox portrayed by Wilde in including the pseudo antithesis of “not moral” and “not wrong” shows the two are not mutually exclusive, but instead may be regarded differently by others, depending on their point of view. This view of “means justify the ends” is the philosophy that Lord Henry employs in his persuasion (or hypnosis) of the naive Dorian Gray in Chapter II. The metaphor used by Wilde “live life for the sake of art” exemplifies Lord Henry’s theory, in that life should be lived for something, not for the goal of something.