firstly, i don't feel like this is a story is about a pedophile. to apply terms like "homosexual" and "pedophile" is to grossly malign the intentions of the author. just like calling somebody a "black" instead of a "human being" is a limiting statement, not a summary. this is a story about desire. nothingness, perfection and humanity are all explored in the story also. the vastness of the sea represents a sort of perfect nothingness, a void. in one particular scene, a human actually interrupts this perfection in the form of Tadzio walking across the horizon line in Aschenbach's field of vision:

"as he sat there dreaming thus, deep, deep into the void, suddenly the margin line of the shore was cut by a human form. He gathered up his gaze and withdrew it from the illimitable..."

here, it's as if Aschenbach's appreciation of perfection shifts from the unattainable nothingness of the sea to the more tangible, Eros-like beauty of the boy.

Later on the same page, Aschenbach is still admiring the boy, and seeing him frown at the Russian family on the beach "gave to the godlike and inexpressible the final human touch."

Aschenbach is not drooling over this boy's sculpted rear or the wisp of hair under his belly button. This is not sexual longing. If anything, I thought his makeover towards the end of the book is more out of an effort to emulate Tadzio, to attain his perfection, than to woo him. Earlier in the story, he sees an old man playing with some youths, trying to conceal his age with cosmetics and clothing, and Aschenbach is offended by this. it seems more likely that Aschenbach becomes this man that he initially rebukes for his falseness. Jung believed that what we dislike most in others is what we are afraid is true of ourselves. perhaps Aschenbach's response to the Old-youth, as I think he calls him, foreshadows the falsehood of Aschenbach's later transformation into a dark-haired, carmine-cheeked, full-lipped old man.

To be disgusted by the taboo aspect of the story is to consider sex the only endpoint of desire. Desire can be thought of as man's response to perfection. Desire can be actualized through ownership, possession, or through art by capture. One sees a beautiful flower and takes a photograph, writes a sonnet, paints a canvas to try and capture its perfection. In this story, Aschenbach does attempt to write in Tadzio's presence, as if he's working through different expressions of desire in his lack of self-understanding.

Death in Venice lacks sex or sexual thoughts. Any disgust in the reader towards the nonexistent consummation of Aschenbach's desire is almost like an autobiographical statement about the reader's own desires and transgressions, which is the most interesting thing about the story.

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I do feel like Death in Venice suffers from the worst kind of literary allusion. Passages like this:

" 'Aha, little Phaeax,' he thought. 'It seems you are priveleged to sleep yourself out.' With sudden gaiety he quoted:

'Oft veranderten Schmuck und warme Bader and Ruhe.'

He took lesirely breakfast. The porter came up..."

just irritate me, because they do little to advance the narrative or the mood and they don't elucidate tricky points by providing analogy. they're just there so that you have to look them up, like neon flashbulbs on the Las Vegas strip, shouting, "this is high art!"

I don't feel like the inclusion of Greek mythology somehow "elevates" a work of literature. When I see references to mythology in a novel, I simply assume that the mythological referent is very similar to the situation in the book, except that it happened a long time ago. i didn't bother to look up who "Phaeax" was because, frankly, I don't care. That connection would not flesh out the character or the situation for me, just as the allusion in the phrase, "chocolate-covered strawberries are my Achilles heel" does not add any depth to the expressed description.

When well utilized, allusion can be very effective. T.S. Eliot often uses it to further a mood that he's developing, always "making it new." He does not rely on the allusion to do the work for him, and often times it will suffice on its own without the reader understanding its background. For example, in The Waste Land, the final line of this stanza is from Tristan and Isolde and it roughly translates to "desolate and empty is the sea:"

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.

It builds upon the emptiness in the previous lines (the 'nothing', the 'silence'), by evoking a scene where the dying Tristan is waiting for Isolde's ship to appear in the bay, but it fails to show. Even if the reader does not know the origins of the final line, it still works. It feels like it could be part of the poem.

In Thomas Mann, the allusions seem contrived, a cheap trick for creating density where there really is none.