The Characters in "Death in Venice" & "Tonio Kruger"

This horrific nightmare into which the self-destructing Aschenbach descends to his closing stands in baronful contrast to the conclusion to which Tonio comes and which sets him free from the gob of cold beauty into which Aschenbach fell. This is not to say that Tonio turns his back on the beauty which spelled doom for Aschenbach. To the contrary, Tonio is as drawn to that beauty as is Aschenbach, but he is able to step back from his seeking and to see the destructiveness of it. Tonio recognizes that he will be destroying both himself and whatsoever beauty he is able to possess in that emotional pursuit.

Tonio says, " . . . You ought to realize that there is a way of being an blindistic productionificer that goes so deep and is so much a return of origins and destinies that no relish seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace. I admire those proud, cold beings [such as Aschenbach] who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise 'mankind'; but I do not envy them" (Mann 133).

Indeed, despite the depth of the disaster which Aschenbach experiences, it is a tragedy which he brings upon himself, and a tragedy which draws from the endorser more a sense of morbid fascination than neat sympathy. Aschenbach seems such a monster of a sort that it is operose to feel

With respect to Tonio's liberation, Von Gronicka writes, "What power was it that worked this miracle, that liberated Tonio from the tragic fate of the 'hybrid nature' doomed to exist in isolation, neither belonging to the bourgeois world nor to the world of art? This power is Tonio's love for the blond and the fair-haired(prenominal) . . . and for their world of normality" (Von Gronicka 114). Yet this is the same power which destroyed Aschenbach. How, then, can we say that it was an external force which destroyed the one and liberated the former(a). It is clear not an external force, but rather an internal chemical reaction to an external force. The difference is not in the blond and blue-eyed beauties that the deuce men were drawn to; the difference is to be show instead within the two men, the two artists, themselves.

To some extent, artists or not, we face the same dilemma faced by Aschenbach and Tonio Kruger. If this were not true, the two works by Mann would not have the bulky impact they have had, on artists and non-artists. Tonio, like most of us, survives because he opens to invigoration and other humans and refuses to alienate himself in the take a leak of an abstract ideal.

This does not mean, however, that we would rather live the life of Aschenbach than we would the life of Tonio Kruger. In fact, in a sense, we are confronted, when we read the two stories, with the same sort of decision that the two artists must face.

As we read in Lukacs, the two stories have a maven problem: "the life of the artist himself . . . Of the import of his hero (Mann) says in Death in Venice: 'Gustav Aschenbach was the poet spokesman of all those who labour at the acuity of exhaustion; of the overburdened . . . who yet contrive . . . to produce . . . the motion of greatness." Tonio, on the other hand, "sees clearly that a real art (a real culture and morality) could only be achieved in his sidereal day by taking the path he had chosen. On the other hand he loves life and rates it higher than an art forced
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