In this rich, many-layered article Slochower traces Aschenbach's transition from a controlled, prudent individual to one gradually overwhelmed by long repressed forces. He succumbs to a dreamlike state during which he falls in love with a young boy and surrenders to 'the waves of his homo-erotic impulses'. This struggle repeats a leading motif of Mann's works: the relation between discipline and dissolution, a polarity derived from the competing influences of a German businessman father and a warm, musical, Mediterranean mother. Mann manipulates the affective response of the reader by a skilful interweaving of concrete detail with passages that evoke feelings of transcendence. Thus he gives 'the unreal a measure of reality'.