SOURCE: Binion, Rudolph. “Death Beckoning: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.” In Sounding the Classics, pp. 135-44. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Binion discusses Aschenbach's preoccupation with death and “his headlong rush to meet it” in Death in Venice.

The story line of Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice is short and straight. An aging author settled in Munich travels south on an impulse for a brief respite from his harsh and lonely literary labors, finds his way as if by enchantment to Venice in all its moldy magnificence, and there is secretly so smitten with a Polish boy among the other guests summering in the same grand hotel on the Lido that he cannot tear himself away despite a spreading plague to which he eventually succumbs. The narrative, richly and finely wrought, often verges on a studied monologue by the solitary, self-enclosed hero as it...