Riddles and Enigmas in Oscar Wilde’s The Doer of Good: A Critical Analysis via Roland Barthes’ Five Narrative Codes

Abstract

This article explores hermeneutic code in Oscar Wilde’s narrative poem The Doer of Good. It was Roland Barthes who introduced the idea that any literary narrative is governed by the main five codes. It has been highlighted that although Barthes later in his career turned towards post-structuralism yet there had been a time when still being a structuralist, he proposed the notion of five narrative codes. The article argues that the hermeneutic code has remained the dominant one in The Doer of Good. The idea of service is very fundamental to Christianity and Oscar Wilde being a pioneer of aestheticism, through such code, problematizes the acts of compassion and service. The story revolves around the basic binary notions of compassion and detachment where it becomes difficult to decide whether the act of compassion is beneficial or not. Although Roland Barthes claims that hermeneutic code functions better in a readerly text yet the current study reveals that this code does perform well for the writerly text too. This study can be helpful for further structuralist and post-structuralist researches on Oscar Wilde’s works.