He dies in his beach chair, looking at the boy on the beach. But he does not escape, nor does he warn the boy’s family of the fatal danger. Wandering through the streets of Venice, he ignores the health notices in the city, only later learning that there is a serious cholera epidemic in Venice. He returns to the hotel drawn by the enthrallment for the young lad, Tadzio, he had spotted there. The putrid smell of the lagoon hastens his departure, but a strange coincidence makes him change his mind. In the meantime, he suffers from depression strengthened by feats of febrile listlessness, pressure in the temples, heaviness of the eyelids that make discontent befall him. Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912), presents a story of an artist, Gustav von Aschenbach, suffering from the writer’s block who travels to Venice to look for inspiration and where he eventually finds his death. Travel and Disease in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice Abstract Institute of English and American Studies, University of Opole, Poland
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