"Death in Venice"-- the point of it all?

Question

I read the book years ago and saw the movie last month. In telling the story to a friend, I couldn't figure out what it meant...
Was it about the futility of nostalgia?
Or was Aschenbach reflecting on a squandered life?
Or was it simply his coming-out tale?

Answer 1

Mann's novella Death in Venice is recognized as his best-known and most enigmatic work. Critics assert that the story skillfully combines psychological realism and mythological symbolism to create a multidimensional story that explores the moral transformation of an artist in quest for perfect beauty. It is considered a powerful meditation upon the relationship between art and beauty as well as love and death.

Critics often discuss Mann's exploration of Apollonian and Dionysian elements in Death in Venice; some view it from a Freudian perspective as a struggle between Aschenbach's id and superego. It is this tension between Aschenbach's disciplined, ascetic side and his lustful, reckless one that is identified as the major thematic concern of the novella. Commentators have detected autobiographical elements to this theme: like his protagonist, Mann had a bohemian mother and bourgeois father and had several homoerotic attachments to younger men he met while on vacation. Some critics have viewed the attachments depicted in Death in Venice as a celebration of male friendship as depicted in Plato's Phaedrus. Others interpret Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio as a representation of the Socratic ideal of the older male lover and his younger male beloved. Homosexuality, or pedophilia, is regarded as an important thematic issue; Mann's own homoerotic experiences are viewed as central to any discussion of the novella. Some critics note that the progress of the plague around the city mirrors Aschenbach's growing obsession with Tadzio. Mythological allusions in the story have been studied at great length, and the setting of Death in Venice is considered significant—critics assert that Venice symbolizes sickness, decay, and death.