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Satire
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Though the beginning of the novella is set in the Bavarian city of Munich in Germany, most of the novel is set in Venice in the early years of the 20th century, shortly before the First World War. For Aschenbach, who rarely travels because of his focus on his work, Venice is a world utterly foreign to his usual routines, habits, and patterns, representing an "escape" from the ordinary.
Mann describes the various contradictions that, for him, characterize the city in a scene in which Aschenbach follows Tadzio—the adolescent boy with whom he has become obsessed—around the city during an outbreak of Cholera, an often-deadly bacterial infection:
That was Venice, the obsequious and untrustworthy beauty—this city, half fairy tale, half tourist trap, in whose reeking atmosphere art had once extravagantly luxuriated, and which had inspired composers with music that gently rocks you and meretriciously lulls you to rest. The adventurer felt as if his eyes were drinking in this luxuriance, as if his ears were being wooed by these melodies; he also recollected that the city was sick and was disguising the fact so it could go on making money; and he was more unbridled as he watched for the gondola that glided ahead of him.
The narrator describes Venice, which has long been a major tourist destination, as "half fairy tale, half tourist trap." It is, in this passage, a city that has inspired great artists and musicians in the past but now caters to the whims of international tourists. Because of the city's economic dependence upon the tourism industry, the city officials have attempted to conceal an outbreak of cholera so that the city can "go on making money." Mann characterizes Venice, then, as a city whose grand history stands in awkward tension with its commercial present.
Related Themes:
