Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Across the River and into the Trees, presented in a series of commonalities and differences. Death in Venice is set in the summer on Venice's Lido; Hemingway puts Cantwell in Venice in the winter. Mann's protagonist is a writer; Hemingway's a soldier. Both faced death, and in the face of death sought solace in a much younger character. Cantwell reminisces about the past while Renata (an 18-year-old countess with whom Cantwell spends the last days of his life) lives in the present. Cantwell says that "Every day is a new and fine illusion" where a kernel of truth can be found. Cantwell is a character in opposition: a tough soldier yet a tender friend and lover. The two Cantwells at times overlap and bleed into one another. Hemingway added yet another layer in the characterization: 50-year-old Cantwell in his dying day is "in an intense state of awareness" of his younger self of 1918 to the point that meld – yet retain the differences wrought by time. Charles Oliver writes the novel shows a central Hemingway theme of "maintaining control over one's life, even in the face of terrible odds." Cantwell knows he is dying and faces death "with the dignity which he believes he has maintained throughout his military service." Oliver thinks the two male characters, Cantwell and Alvarito, have an unstated understanding – both men love Renata, but Cantwell accepts and is happy to know Renata will almost certainly marry Alvarito. Within hours of dying, he says to himself: "You have said goodbye to your girl and she has said goodbye to you. That is certainly simple". The theme of death is central in Hemingway's writings and his characters routinely achieve redemption at the moment of death, which can be seen as a form of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre believed to face death well is to live a heightened existence. Jackson Benson writes that how a writer transforms biographical events into art is more important than looking for connections between Hemingway's life and his fiction. He believes autobiographical events may have a "very tenuous relationship" with the fiction similar to a dream from which a drama emerges. Hemingway's later fiction, Benson writes "is like an adolescent day-dream in which he acts out infatuation and consummation, as in Across the River." Meyers agrees that parallels exist between Hemingway and Colonel Cantwell, but he sees