LIT2120 Exam #3 Realism in Literature Realism, a verisimilitude grasp on the lives of characters, utilizes the political events of the era to accurately portray society’s psychological grapple between right and wrong. This is demonstrated in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” and Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” as they were both written in response to Nazism. Although Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” was not a response to political warfare, it served as a comment on the internal conflict between choosing life or death, similar to the civilians during World War I and II. Mann, Borges, and Borowski utilize Realist characteristics to depict the bleak lives of their characters. The protagonist of “Death in Venice,” Von Aschenbach, illustrates a sense of foreboding with its incessant foreshadowing of death and use of interior monologue, a textual technique from Psychological Realism. Aschenbach, a writer filled with inexorable wanderlust, flees to Venice in search for inspiration. There, he finds Tadzio, a young boy whose family is staying in the same hotel as Aschenbach. As the novela progresses, he increasingly follows, and essentially stalks, the young boy. Becoming infatuated with Tadzio’s physicality, Aschenbach rationalizes his pedophilia by likening his beauty to figures and Gods of Greek mythology, in attempt to emulate a sense of artistic transcendence when drawing inspiration from Tadzio:
