Death in Venice: An Interpretive Essay

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He dies on the beach as he is trying to rise out of his chair and go to meet the boy.

Mann's story is reflective of an artist who has come to realize that his art has been false since it has not come from a place of true emotion and passion. The story has parallels with Euripides' The Bachae, in which the hero Pentheus is repressed in his artistic approach to life until he comes to inject elements of Dionysian revelry into his life, whereupon he dresses up in youthful clothes (like the old man Aschenbach met on his journey), and throws himself into life. In a passage in which Aschenbach quotes Plato's Phaedras, he also makes his own realization that he has been repressed because he hasn't accepted the beauty of emotion and passion into his art. His attraction to the boy Tadzio has made him aware of this since he struggles against that attraction and tries to repress it even as it wells up within him. He can't bring himself to turn away from the attraction, but neither can he act on it. He becomes disgusted with himself even as he comes to accept his plight as an artist.

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In the novella's final scene, when he finally comes to imagine that there is a possibility that the boy might welcome his approach, Aschenbach finds that he cannot get up from his chair, suddenly weakened from disease. His life's decadence, his self-delusion regarding his art, has come to kill him. Since he had never really accepted the artistic impulse in his work, once he found it ready to accept him -- in the form of the boy -- he was too weak to do anything about it......

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