How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He was clearly not of Bavarian stock and, if nothing else, the broad, straight-brimmed bast hat covering his head lent him a distinctly foreign, exotic air. He did, however, have the customary knapsack strapped to his shoulders, wore a yellowish belted suit of what appeared to be loden […] (1.4)
Right from the outset, when Aschenbach runs across this fellow in his local graveyard, the figure of the foreign-seeming "other" takes center stage. It's important to remember that this character is not necessarily a foreigner—his dress and appearance gives him "a distinctly foreign, exotic air." When we talk about the "other" in Death in Venice, usually we're talking about some strange otherness that emerges within the familiar.
Quote #2
It was wanderlust, pure and simple, yet it had come upon him like a seizure and grown into a passion—no, more, an hallucination. 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 desire to see exotic places, described here in colorful terms as a vision of "primordial wilderness," is just a precursor to his discovery of his erotic desires for Tadzio. Is it a real wilderness that Aschenbach longs for, or is it instead an imaginary space within himself, a strangeness and "wildness" that he longs to unleash?
Quote #3
Gustav von Aschenbach was born in L., a county town in the province of Silesia, the son of a senior official in the judiciary. His forebears had been officers, judges, and civil servants, men who led disciplined, decently austere lives serving king and state. A certain inner spirituality had manifested itself in the person of the only clergy man amongst them, and a strain of more impetuous, sensual blood had found its way into the family in the previous generation through the writer's mother, the daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster. She was the source of the foreign racial features in his appearance. It was the union of the father's sober, conscientious nature with the darker, more fiery impulses of the mother that engendered the artist—and this particular artist. (2.1)
Aschenbach doesn't just encounter "others"—he is one himself. It's easy to overlook this passage, where Aschenbach's background is described as a combination of the "inner spirituality" of his father, descended from a long line of clergymen and civil servants, and the "fiery impulses" of his Bohemian (in this case, probably Czech) mother. In fact, this passage goes so far to suggest that this mixing of backgrounds is what "engendered the artist."