The theme of an older man’s infatuation with a youth appears throughout literature. For example, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me,” Cohen and Melissa in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, to name just a few. How is Jules similar to his predecessors in this regard, as a man close to death who grasps at the incarnation of youth and life, and how does he differ?
