Hello Catherine Gray,

Welcome to writing.com!

You came up in my "Read a Newbie" section and, even though I'm a newbie myself, I thought it'd be fun to check out your profile. This essay caught my eye.

Before I dive into the meat of the review, I thought you should know that I don't remember ever having read "The Wasp Factory", so I'm no expert on the topic by any stretch of the imagination. But I have known some serious narcissists and love to read and write so hopefully you will find my review helpful (or at least interesting) despite my lack of knowledge of one the two books you are discussing.

Overall, I think you did an excellent job of doing what you set out to do. You clearly researched this well and put a lot of thought into it. I enjoyed reading it and I felt like I learned some things when I did.

I thought this was a powerful, deep and thought-provoking line: "The soul and the mind are indulged until an ego can grow large and consume more than it has the right to consume."

This line also made me think: "ego shall take the stage and be exposed as the ravenous property of desperate men creating fictional characters to fight the outside world, while the authors fight internal wars over their own character."

You eloquently put the universal truth that our greatest strengths can also be our greatest weakness with this sentence: "This is the exploration of how the most formidable of character traits can be the most self-destructive."

My favorite line of your essay was this one: "The animalistic nature of the morals that they both put forward is very base and lacks the pleasure of a soul at the centre of their theories."

In the spirit of helpfulness, I do have some constructive criticism to offer. Please take what serves you and disregard anything that doesn't. If you don't want constructive criticism, just know that I enjoyed your writing and stop reading now.

In this sentence, I think you have a typo: " However, especially when looking at the author's narcissism, it is important to note the possibility that his homosexual indulgencies could have come from his incessant demand for love, self-indulgence and intense experiences, it is possinle that Wilde wanted love and he didn't care where or who it came from." and that instead of "possinle" you meant "possible."

In this sentence, there's a comma that just needs to be moved: "Oscar Wilde would have stuck to his ravenous ideology, his aesthetics ,hedonism and bent the world to make sense in accordance to what he believes; 'I have a loaded revolver and I will shoot you'(3)." instead of "asethetics , hedonism..." it should be "aesthetics, hedonism..."

In this sentence, I wondered what "his" was supposed to modify? A face? or if you meant "him" instead and it was just a typo? "This is not the only time that Dorian is referred to as a piece of fruit by Basil, he also describes his as 'made out of ivory and rose leaves'(p6) connoting the image of an apple."

In this sentence, I think "makes" would work better than "making:" "Oscar Wilde clings to aesthetics for the base of his morality instead of anything spiritual and Iain Banks making languid stabs at being a better person on the back of his admittance that he is not. "

In this sentence I think authors should be possessive, as in authors' : "Perhaps it is the authors complete disregard for morals that make their writing intriguing."

Again, I enjoyed reading your informative essay!

Thank you for sharing!
All the best to you!
PWheeler

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My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .