Exploring Death in Death in Venice Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, is a story that deals with mortality on many different levels. There is the obvious physical death from cholera, and the cyclical death in nature: at the beginning it is spring and at the end it is autumn. In Gustav Aschenbach's dreams we see a sort of death of the ego. Venice itself is a personification of death and death is seen as the leitmotif in musical terms. It is also reflected in the idea of ​​the traveler reaching the end of a long tiring journey. It should also be noted that there are no women in prominent roles in the story. The hero's wife has long been dead, and his daughter is married and gone for many years. All the women in the story are simply in the background, nameless and colorless, totally insignificant. Mann deliberately excluded them because they are givers of life, a symbol of fertility and birth. (The only scene in which women play an active role is in the degrading and violently promiscuous dream.) There are clear homosexual undertones evident almost from the moment Aschenbach sees Tadzio, the object of his obsession. It appears by far the most important level of death in the crumbling of Aschenbach's life principles: the renunciation and abandonment of all those ideals that had shaped his character and had shaped his work and guided every aspect of his entire life. It is a complete surrender of himself to everything that until now was anathema to him. The mind, reason, rationality and everything that goes with it: service, dignity and moderation, everything collapses and dies, everything falls in the wake of the onslaught of passion and chaos. Dreams play an important role in history and, throughout the history of literature, sleep has often been considered... in the center of the paper... one can assume that perhaps Aschenbach's shadow would have crossed the Styx (in a black gondola), or more likely he would follow Tadzio's outward pointing finger and join Poseidon's ranks, plunging "into the immensity of the richest expectation" (75) seeking "refuge...in the bosom of simple and vast" [ocean] (31). Gustav thought of the boy as Phaeax, one of the sons of the sea god (29). He had seen this divine creature “with dripping curls…emerge from the depths of sea and sky” (33). What more appropriate way to leave the earthly fray than by returning to the "birth of form... the origin of the gods" (33)? Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. Introductory lessons on psychoanalysis. Chap. 9, 14.Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia Vol. 24, pag. 388.Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice. 1911. New York: Vintage, 1958.