Death in Venice: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

About two weeks after his walk in Munich, Aschenbach took a trip to an island in the Adriatic. It had “beautifully eroded cliff scenery,” but too much rain and too many Austrian tourists. He wanted to go somewhere else, somewhere “different as a fairy tale,” and suddenly realized that he should go to Venice.

Aschenbach boarded an old Italian ship bound for Venice. An old sailor welcomed him aboard and told him that Venice was an attractive destination for both its history and its “present-day charms.” Aschenbach examined some of the boat’s other passengers and saw what looked like a young man in a stylish suit and hat. but then he suddenly realized that it was actually an old man with wrinkles trying to affect a “youthful impression.”

The old man was wearing makeup, a wig, and dentures. Aschenbach regarded this old man with horror, and felt slightly like he was in a dream. Out at sea, Aschenbach lost track of time and daydreamed. After eating a meal, he looked out to see if he could see Venice yet but he couldn’t see through the gray rain and mist. On previous visits he had always seen Venice in the sun, and now accepted that he would arrive “at a different Venice by sea route,” than by land, as he had previously traveled.

Aschenbach gazed into the distance and at last the coastline of Venice began to emerge. All the boat’s passengers were excited to arrive, and Aschenbach saw with disgust that the old man dressed up as a youth was “pitifully drunk.” Aschenbach delighted in all the buildings and architecture of Venice and realized that coming by sea was the only proper way to arrive in “that most improbable of cities.”

While preparing to board a gondola, Aschenbach was forced to stand around next to the strange old man, who was blabbering on drunkenly—until his upper denture fell out of his mouth. Aschenbach felt a little trepidation on getting onto his gondola, whose black color reminded him of a coffin and of death itself. The gondola’s seat was “the softest, most luxurious and enervating seat in the world.”

Aschenbach felt calm and at ease in the gondola. He was troubled, though, when he noticed they were going out to sea, not to the vaporetto stop from where he wanted to go to his hotel. His gondolier informed him that he could not take the vaporetto with luggage and so the gondola would go all the way to the hotel. Aschenbach sank into a dreamy calm. He asked how much the gondola ride would cost, but all the gondolier would say was, “You will pay.”

Aschenbach arrived at his hotel and went to the front desk to get some change in order to pay his gondolier. When he returned, though, the gondolier had gone. An old man told him that his gondolier was “a bad man, a man without a license.” Aschenbach went into his hotel and looked out at the beach.

The narrator reflects on solitude, which can produce both originality and perverseness. The solitary Aschenbach walked along the seaside promenade and then came back to the hotel. In the lounge, while waiting for dinner, he looked at some of the hotel guests and saw a variety of nationalities. He saw a group of three adolescent Polish girls and a boy of about fourteen with a governess. The boy was “perfectly beautiful,” with “honey-colored hair,” and a form reminiscent of Greek statuary.

The Polish girls had “austere and chaste” attire in contrast to the boy’s “rich and pampered appearance.” A waiter announced that dinner was ready, and most of the hotel guests went to eat, but the Polish family kept waiting, and Aschenbach waited as well, sitting in a chair and watching them. The Polish children’s mother arrived, a stylish and elegant woman who Aschenbach imagined might be the wife of a high-ranking German government official.

The family went off to dinner, and as the young boy was leaving, he stopped and turned around, briefly meeting Aschenbach’s gaze. Aschenbach went to go eat dinner, slightly disappointed not to be sitting near the Polish family. While eating, he thought of very abstract things, including the nature of beauty and the “general problems of form and art.” He went to bed early that night and when he woke the next day, the weather was still overcast.

Aschenbach remembered when he had experienced similar weather in Venice once before and had to leave because the weather affected his health. He worried that a similar sickness was setting in now. He went down to breakfast and saw the Polish boy’s family without him. He smiled at the thought of the young boy sleeping in, and as Aschenbach was finishing breakfast the boy arrived.

Aschenbach was stunned by the boy’s “godlike beauty,” evident in his appearance and graceful walk. He thought the boy had the head of Eros and skin like marble. He regarded the boy with “that professionally cool approval in which artists sometimes cloak their rapture and ecstasy when face to face with a masterpiece.”

After breakfast, Aschenbach went to the beach and enjoyed watching people having fun in the water. He started daydreaming and looked out at the “unorganized, immoderate, eternal” sea, which he was fond of for “deep-seated reasons.” He saw the Polish boy in the water and saw as the boy looked disapprovingly at a family of Russians on the beach.

Aschenbach was delighted to see this, as for him it made the godlike boy more human. He listened as the boy played with some friends and thought he heard the friends call the boy Adgio or Adgiu. He kept listening to them as he worked on writing some letters. He couldn’t focus on the letters for long, though, and soon went back to looking at the sea and keeping an eye on the young Polish boy.

Aschenbach watched the boy play with some other children, especially another Polish boy who appeared to be called Jaschu. It was very hot outside. Remembering some Polish, Aschenbach thought the boy’s name must be Tadzio. He saw Tadzio go swimming and then come back out of the water and was taken by the sight of the boy climbing out of the waves, which “inspired mythic ideas,” about “the birth of the gods.”

Aschenbach read on the beach, but was constantly thinking of Tadzio, who was lying on the beach nearby. He felt a “paternal kindness” toward Tadzio, like “a man who through self-sacrifice creates the beautiful in his mind feels toward one who possesses beauty itself.”

Around noon, Aschenbach went back to his room and looked at his gray hair and wrinkled face in the mirror. He went to lunch and afterwards found himself in the same elevator as some young children, including Tadzio. He was standing so close to Tadzio that he began to see him as a human being, rather than as a beautiful work of art. He saw that Tadzio’s teeth looked brittle and translucent, as if he were sick, and concluded, with some delight, that Tadzio would not live to a very old age.

In the afternoon, Aschenbach went for a walk around the city of Venice. The air was thick and unpleasant, Aschenbach began to feel feverish, and he decided to leave Venice. He was sure the weather was affecting his health, and planned to go to Trieste, rather than back home. He returned to the hotel, packed, and arranged to leave the next day.

The next morning, the air was a little better, and Aschenbach wondered if he had decided to leave Venice too quickly. He had breakfast, and a man from the hotel told him that a car was ready to take him away. He told the man that he wanted to wait and eat breakfast slowly, though, and waited for Tadzio to come down to breakfast. The car was waiting for Aschenbach, so he sent his luggage ahead in it, and stayed at the hotel for a little longer.

Just as he was leaving, Aschenbach saw Tadzio, and he left the hotel full of regret. As Aschenbach went through Venice, he began to realize he would miss the city’s “odor of sea and swamp.” He felt that he would never see Venice again and was greatly conflicted over whether to leave or stay. At the train station, a man from the hotel informed him that his luggage had been sent ahead to Como, by mistake, and Aschenbach gladly took this as an opportunity to stay in Venice, feeling that it was fate for him to remain.

Aschenbach happily returned to his hotel and was given a new room there. He spent most of the day in his room and thought the air outside seemed fresher and less oppressive. He saw Tadzio coming back from the beach and, with a combination of “joy and pain,” realized that it was because of Tadzio that he had been so reluctant to leave Venice. He sat in his room and lifted up his arms in “a gesture that bespoke an open welcome, a calm acceptance.”