Essay on Exploring Death in Death in Venice

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Exploring Death in Death in Venice

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, is a story that deals with mortality on many different levels. There is the obvious physical death by cholera, and the cyclical death in nature: in the beginning it is spring and in the end, autumn. We see a kind of death of the ego in Gustav Aschenbach's dreams. Venice itself is a personification of death, and death is seen as the leitmotif in musical terms. It is also 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 hero's 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 important level of death appears in the crumbling of Aschenbach's 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 wake 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...

... middle of paper ...

...one can surmise perhaps Aschenbach's shade would then have been rowed across the Styx (in a black gondola), or more possibly he would have followed Tadzio's outwardly pointing finger and joined Poseidon's ranks, plunging "into an immensity of richest expectation" (75) seeking "refuge . . . in the bosom of the simple and vast" [ocean] (31). Gustav thought of the boy as Phaeax, one of the sea god's sons (29). He had seen this godlike creature "with dripping 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)?

Works 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.

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