Week 02: Vampires - Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice (6 pts)

Vampire Week!

            This week is vampire week and I have decided to read Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice. When I first started reading I did not know what to expect. I didn’t know if I should expect the vampires to be modern and kinda goofy like in the Twilight franchise or have a creepy old school vampire like in Nosferatu. Little did I know the psychological drama that this book was offering me through the point of view of Louis who is gladly retelling his tale of unfortunate events.

    As most fiction that involves vampires this book explores how relationships change and deform once you have turned to the dark side. How you outlive others who aren’t part of your kind and watch as the world changes without ever stopping. Yet this book truly makes the readers jump into the deep end by exploring how becoming a vampire not only changes your diet but makes you outlive your previous beliefs or morals. How as the years go by and you are becoming more and more isolated from who you used to be. We see this in detail with Louis who for years tries to still to stay as he has always been and not feeding into Lestat’s ways of living or thinking. He respects what it means to be mortal and how it offers many pleasures that he can no longer partake on such as looking at the blue see or watching a sunrise/sunset. Yet the demands of his new identity suck out his morals and resistance making him feel empty as he no longer has anything to remind him of who he was or wants to be.             The ways this book truly puts in perspective how the vampire signifies beings who are basically in limbo trying to obtain something that they once lost and how the years truly suck away at their spirits just as they suck away at their prey. This explains their need of companionship and their need to be with someone who feels and reminds them of their previous life. You can see this with Lestat, Armand and Claudia who demand Louis’s companionship. Yet once Louis loses his little bit of humanity when Madeleine becomes a vampire we the reader truly lose all that’s left of Louis we know from part one.

            I quite enjoy the books way of talking about nature vs nurture. How Claudia is basically nurtured to be a vampire and is a being that did not have the opportunity to be her own person before being turned. I feel she is one of the most complex characters in this book since she is a cursed vampire in a sense since she never had the opportunity to grow up and develop who she truly wants it to be. She is a character that is filled with hate and barely has any experiences to remember that give her any positive feelings. Claudia does not know what it means to be alive neither what it means to be dead. All she knows is that she is trapped inside a body that does not reflect who she is. The more I think about it the more complex themes she seems to explore.

            I think the moral of this book is that once truly starts to die once you lose your morals and betray your beliefs. Louis truly started to die once he took his first kill or stopped drinking from rats instead of humans. He started to decay the moment he turned Madeleine to a vampire and left Claudia’s side. By betraying his feelings, he lost himself to the void which disconnected him not only from himself but from society. He is a ghost retelling his tale trying to spread warning yet as we can see in the end it all falls to deaf ears.