Death in venice text. Death in Venice — Reader Response: Text Messages 2023-01-06
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Death in Venice is a novella written by Thomas Mann in 1912. The story centers on the character of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful and highly respected German writer who is struggling with feelings of creative stagnation and existential despair. Aschenbach decides to take a vacation in Venice in an effort to rejuvenate his artistic inspiration and to escape the mundane routine of his life.
As he settles into his luxurious hotel on the Lido, Aschenbach becomes fascinated by a beautiful young boy named Tadzio, who is vacationing with his family at the same hotel. Despite the fact that Aschenbach is middle-aged and Tadzio is just a teenager, Aschenbach becomes increasingly obsessed with the boy, viewing him as a symbol of beauty and youth.
As Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio grows, he becomes increasingly isolated and disconnected from the world around him. He becomes fixated on the boy, spending hours watching him from a distance and even following him through the streets of Venice. Aschenbach's behavior becomes increasingly erratic, and he begins to neglect his personal hygiene and appearance, becoming a shadow of his former self.
As the novella progresses, the city of Venice is hit by a cholera outbreak, which serves as a metaphor for the moral decay and decline that Aschenbach sees in himself. Despite the danger posed by the outbreak, Aschenbach remains in Venice, unable to tear himself away from Tadzio and his own obsession.
In the end, Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio leads to his own demise, as he succumbs to the cholera outbreak and dies in the streets of Venice. His death serves as a commentary on the destructive power of unfulfilled desire and the dangers of allowing oneself to be consumed by an unhealthy obsession.
Overall, Death in Venice is a poignant and thought-provoking exploration of the human condition, tackling themes of beauty, desire, and the search for meaning in life. It is a powerful and enduring work that continues to resonate with readers to this day.
Death in Venice
An elaborate sand pile to the right, erected by children, had flags in the colours of all nations planted around it. He did this with his usual care and slowness, since he was accustomed to working over his toilette. One had not gone to table before the mother, one had waited for her, greeted her and observed the usual customs on entering the dining room. The euphemistic nature of the decree was apparent. A measure without grave implications. To find peace in the presence of the faultless is the desire of the one who seeks excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection? Aschenbach observed him darkly, and a feeling of numbness came over him again, as though the world were displaying a faint but irresistible tendency to distort itself into the peculiar and the grotesque: a feeling which circumstances prevented him from surrendering himself to completely, for just then the pounding activity of the engines commenced again, and the ship, resuming a voyage which had been interrupted so near its completion, passed through the San Marco canal. The employee rushed off to see if it were still possible to stop the trunk, and as was to be expected he returned with nothing accomplished.
Au revoir, excusez, and bon jour, your excellency! They kissed their mother's hand, who looked above their heads with an aloof smile of her well-groomed but slightly tired and sharp-nosed face and addressed a few words in French to the governess. And a fatherly awe, the complete devotion of the one who tries to create beauty to the one who is endowed with it filled and moved his heart. His sleep was fitful; the preciously uniform days were separated by short nights of happy unrest. The red bow symbolizes the passion Aschenbach feels and how he believes that Tadzio feels the connection between the two of them as well. The set of his face, the blond curly moustache beneath a curtly turned-up nose, undoubtedly meant that he was not Italian.
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann.
And with the aid of a few scrappy recollections of Polish he decided that they must mean Tadzio, the shortened form of Tadeusz, and sounding like Tadziu when it is called. Oddly indignant and affectionate admonitions escaped him: "You must never smile like that! Then he should drive away and take his luggage with him, Aschenbach responded angrily. Aschenbach is traveling alone so there is no beautiful darling for the old man to be remarking on. A sort of tenderness or terror, something like shame or respect caused Asch- enbach to turn away as if he had seen nothing; because the serious observer of a casual passion refuses to admit his impressions even to himself. The man had mentioned a German family that left soon after their arrival; he added glibly and flatteringly, "But you are staying, sir. A feeling of duty or pride, a kind of recollection that one should prevent such things, gave him the strength to arouse himself once more. What had been a partial misgiving this morning, a faint doubt as to the advisability of his move, now became a distress, a positive misery, a spiritual hunger, and so bitter that it frequently brought tears to his eyes, while he told himself that he could not possibly have foreseen it.
Aschenbach was not a lover of pleasure. There he sat, the master, the dignified artist, the author of the "Miserable", who in such an exemplary and pure fashion had spoken against wandering and these murky depths, who had revoked his sympathy for the abyss and who had cast away what was cast away, the ascended one, the vanquisher of his knowledge and no longer partial to irony, who had accepted the responsibilities that fame brings, he whose fame was official, whose name bore the knighthood and who wrote in a style schoolboys were asked to imitate — he was sitting there, eyes closed, sometimes with a very fleeting expression of mockery and embarrassment and with his flaccid lips, improved through cosmetic artifice, forming occasional words out of what his half-sleeping brain was producing with a dreamlike logic. About noon he saw Tadzio in a striped linen suit with a red tie, coming back from the sea across the private beach and along the boardwalk to the hotel. It was clear that in his existence the first factors were gentleness and tenderness. Interpretation and Textual Analysis 1.
Others were rowing about in little red and blue striped boats without keels; they were continually upsetting, amid laughter. There are many such: they are the heroes of the period. Retrieved 29 March 2022. Work Cited: Mann, Thomas. Leaning back against the soft black cushions, he rocked and glided towards the other black-beaked craft where his passion was drawing him.
The boy was absent. The Englische Garten, although only slightly leafy, was humid as in August and had been teeming with carriages and strollers where it was close to the city. The horizon was unbroken. They made a lot of fuss about themselves and their enterprise, chattered, laughed, contentedly enjoyed their own gesticulating and mocked those colleagues, who, portfolios tucked under their arms, were walking along the street to pursue their business and who made threatening gestures to the departing. But what really caused Aschenbach to focus on him was the observation that the suspicious figure seemed to carry with it its own suspicious ambience.
After instrumental pieces there were vocal numbers, such as the one where the younger woman, with a sharp and squawking voice, joined with the tenor in sweet falsetto for a love duet. Had not this Eros stood in high repute among the bravest of peoples; was it not true that precisely through bravery he had flourished in their cities? More than that, he never wants to have the boy out of his sight. Aschenbach smiled to himself. Delighted and appreciative, they were living there, patiently calling the names of the two rowdy disobedient children, using their scanty Italian to joke with the humorous old man from whom they were buying candy, kissing one another on the cheek, and not in the least concerned with any one who might be observing their community. Since he would have fallen at the first step, he did not trust himself from the spot—yet he showed a deplorable insolence, buttonholed everyone who came near him, stammered, winked, and tittered, lifted his wrinkled, ornamented index finger in a stupid attempt at bantering, while he licked the corers of his mouth with his tongue in the most abominably suggestive manner. For instance, Roger Ebert wrote: "I think the thing that disappoints me most about Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice" is its lack of ambiguity. After being repeatedly assured that the Aschenbach considers warning Tadzio's mother of the danger; however, he decides not to, knowing that if he does, Tadzio will leave the hotel and be lost to him.
On the left, in front of a hut that stood at a right angle to the other ones and was the endpoint of the beach on that side, a Russian family was camping: men with beards and large teeth, mellow and idle women, a Baltic damsel, who was sitting in front of an easel and was painting the sea with intermittent cries of despair, two benevolent and ugly children, an old maidservant with a kerchief and tenderly servile slave manners. It is true, you are rowing me well. Yes, he felt Zephyr's painful jealousy of his rival Apollo, who neglected the Delphi oracle, the bow, and the cithara to play instead with his beloved; he saw the horrid discus hit the lovely head, he caught, turning pale as him, the limp body and the flower, sprung from that sweet blood, bore the inscription of his endless wail. He pays close attention to people and their features. Crowds of locals had gathered in silence on the bridges and squares; the foreigner stood brooding among them.
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Nevertheless the lone man felt especially entitled to participate in the secret; and although he was excluded, he derived a grotesque satisfaction from putting embarrassing questions to those who did know, and as they were pledged to silence, forcing them into deliberate lies. But while Europe was fearing the specter might make its entrance over land, it had appeared in several Mediterranean ports, spread by Syrian traders, had arrived in Toulon, Malaga, Palermo, and Naples, also in Calabria and Apulia. The conflict was intense as he entered the station. When the others were already gone he pretended to run backwards into a lamp post, arriving at the gate in apparent pain. Far from being connoisseurs, they believe that they see in it hundreds of virtues which justify so much interest; but the true reason for their applause is an unconscious sympathy. It seemed as if the disease had become more contagious and virulent.
Death in Venice — Reader Response: Text Messages
He saw a landscape, a tropical swampland under a heavy, murky sky, damp, luxuriant, and enormous, a kind of prehistoric wilderness of islands, bogs, and arms of water, sluggish with mud; he saw, near him and in the distance, the hairy shafts of palms rising out of a rank lecherous thicket, out of places where the plant-life was fat, swollen, and blossoming exorbitantly; he saw strangely misshapen trees sending their roots into the ground, into stagnant pools with greenish reflections; and here, between floating flowers which were milk-white and large as dishes, birds of a strange nature, high-shouldered, with crooked bills, were standing in the muck, and looking motionlessly to one side; between dense, knotted stalks of bamboo he saw the glint from the eyes of a crouching tiger—and he felt his heart knocking with fear and with puzzling desires. But before she died, Zeus rescued their yet unborn child, the god Dionysus. The enamel did not look healthy; it had a peculiar brittleness and transparency, as is often the case with anaemics. A deeper strain of spirituality had been manifest in them once, in the person of a preacher; the preceding generation had brought a brisker, more sensuous blood into the family through the author's mother, daughter of a Bohemian band-master. He had no time to entrench himself behind an expression of repose and dignity.
