How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
His desire sprouted eyes, his imagination, as yet unstilled from its morning labors, conjured for the earth's manifold wonders and horrors in his attempt to visualize them: he saw. He saw a landscape, a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy sky—sultry, luxuriant, and monstrous—a kind of primordial wilderness of islands, marshes, and alluvial channels; saw hairy palm shafts thrusting upward, near and far, from rank clusters of bracken, from beds of thick, swollen and bizarrely burgeoning flora; saw fantastically malformed trees plunge their roots through the air into the soil, into stagnant, shadow-green, looking-glass waters, where, amidst milk-white flowers bobbing like bowls, outlandish stoop-shouldered birds with misshapen beaks stood stock-still in the shallows, peering off to one side; saw the eyes of a crouching tiger gleam out of the knotty canes of a bamboo thicket—and felt his heart pound with terror and an enigmatic craving. (1.6)
Aschenbach's desires are first awakened in the form of a desire for the exotic. Think that's a bit of a leap? Consider this: Some of these images, like the "hairy palm shafts" that are "thrusting upward," have some pretty obvious sexual connotations, implying that the exotic has something to do with the erotic.
Quote #2
What one saw when one looked into the world as narrated by Aschenbach was elegant self-possession concealing inner dissolution and biological decay from the eyes of the world until the eleventh hour; a sallow, sensually destitute ugliness capable of fanning its smoldering lust into a pure flame, indeed, of rising to sovereignty in the realm of beauty; pallid impotence probing the incandescent depths of the mind for the strength to cast an entire supercilious people at the foot of the Cross, at their feet; an obliging manner in the empty, punctilious service of form; the life, false and dangerous, and the swiftly enervating desires and art of the born deceiver. Observing all this and much more of a like nature, one might well wonder whether the only possible heroism was the heroism of the weak. Yet what heroism was more at one with the times? (2.7)
The narrator opens a window into Aschenbach's imagination, in this case, into the world that he invents in his fiction. Still, the idea of an "elegant self-possession concealing inner dissolution and biological decay" sounds a lot like the character of Aschenbach in Death in Venice. We can think of this passage as a sort of blueprint for analyzing Aschenbach's desire for Tadzio as a "smoldering lust" that briefly becomes a "pure flame," rising up into the "realm of beauty" out of a "sensually destitute ugliness." But, does that really jive with how Aschenbach is portrayed?
Quote #3
Eyes glazed over, a cigarette between his trembling fingers, he swayed back and forth in his inebriation, laboriously keeping his balance. Since he would have fallen at the first step, he did not dare move, yet he displayed a pitiful exuberance, buttonholing everyone who came up to him, jabbering, winking, sniggering, lifting a wrinkled, ringed finger as a part of some fatuous teasing, and licking the corners of his mouth with the tip of his tongue in a revoltingly suggestive manner. Aschenbach watched him with a frown, and once more a feeling of numbness came over him, as if the world were moving ever so slightly yet intractably towards a strange and grotesque warping […]. (3.10)
In this passage, the narrator really applies him or herself to depicting this guy's "revoltingly suggestive" antics. This implies that these expressions of lust are gross because the person making them is too old to be sexually attractive. But this guy also foreshadows. Aschenbach's own fate. Are the two characters really equated, or does Aschenbach hold on to some of his dignity?