Death in Venice

             It is a sickness that impairs the body's normal vital functions. If the normal function of the body is to live, then a disease inhibits the body of living fully or at all. We usually define a disease as a viral infection or something caused by a bacteria. Diseases can most often be described in medical terms and be repaired through medical means. There are some diseases that are fatal, and refuse to be cured. Such terminal diseases compound on themselves over time and only get worse until the inevitable occurs: death. As Germaine Greer describes in her book, Love is a disease:.
             In love, as in pain, in shock, in trouble.
             Thus love is a state, presumably a temporary state, an aberration from .
             The norm. The outward symptoms of this state are sleeplessness,.
             distraction, loss of appetite, alternations of euphoria and depression, as .
             well as starry eyes (as in a fever), and agitation (Women and Romance, .
             123). .
             Thomas Mann's short fictional novella, Death in Venice, is laced with this disease motif disguised as love. Aschenbach, the protagonist, for his whole life was an intellectual and a writer. He falls in love with a young Polish boy, Tadzio, who embodies all that Aschenbach never was. Tadzio is a beautifully athletic boy with curling blonde hair, while Aschenbach is a decrepit wrinkled old man lacking all his hair. He is the object of Aschenbach's affection and obsession. Aschenbach's love for this child is a terminal disease. It is terminal because it eventually leads him to his own demise. The disease motif plagues Aschenbach all during his stay in Venice and drives him to do all kinds of ridiculous things and eventually to his death.
             Aschenbach's relationship with Tadzio, if it can even be considered a relationship, began as a simple admiration for such an extraordinary specimen of human beauty. Aschenbach saw Tadzio as a small recreation of the Greek mythological gods.