Essay on Exploring Death in Death in Venice -- Death in Venice Essays

Exploring Death in Death in Venice Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, is a story that deals with deathrate on many different levels. There is the obvious physical death by cholera, and the cyclical death in nature in the beginning it is restrain and in the end, autumn. We see a kind of death of the ego in Gustav Aschenbachs dreams. Venice itself is a personification of death, and death is seen as the leitmotif in musical terms. It is besides reflected in the idea of the traveler coming to the end of a long fatiguing journey. It must also be noted there are no women in the story with prominent roles. The heros wife is long dead and his daughter has been married and gone for many years. Any women in the story are merely in the background, unnamed and colorless-totally insignificant. Mann has purposely left them out because they are life givers, the symbol of fertility and birth. (The only one scene where women have an active role is in the degrading and violently promiscuous dream.) There are definite homosexual overtones evident almost from the moment Aschenbach sees Tadzio-the object of his obsession. By far the most strategic level of death appears in the crumbling of Aschenbachs life principles the giving up and letting go of all those ideals that molded his character and had shaped his work and guided every aspect of his entire life. It is a complete handing over of oneself to all that was heretofore anathema to him. The mind, reason, rationality, and all that goes with it service, dignity, and restraint all buckle and die-all fall in the perk up of the onslaught of passion and chaos. Dreams play a major role in the story, and, throughout the history of literature, sleep has often been consid... ...one can surmise perhaps Aschenbachs specter would then have been rowed across the Styx (in a black gondola), or more possibly he would have followed Tadzios outwardly pointing finger and joined Poseidons ranks, plunging into an immensity of richest prospe ct (75) seeking refuge . . . in the bosom of the simple and vast ocean (31). Gustav thought of the boy as Phaeax, one of the sea gods sons (29). He had seen this godlike creature with trickle locks . . . emerging from the depths of sea and sky (33). What more fitting manner of leaving the earthly fray than by returning to the birth of form . . . the origin of the gods (33)? kit and caboodle Cited Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Chps. 9, 14. Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia Vol. 24, p. 388. Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice. 1911. New York Vintage, 1958.