As stated in my previous journal on Interview with a Vampire, the beginning of the book revolved around Louis’ coming of age as a vampire. At first, he didn’t want to drink human blood and lived off the blood of animals. However, in an attempt to comfort a young girl whose mother died of plague, Louis’ vampiric urges take over; he gets carried away and bites the young girl. Lestat then takes advantage of the situation and turns Claudia into a vampire; because Louis was becoming more and more independent and resistant of Lestat, Claudia served as a way to reign Louis in and keep him by Lestat’s side.
After several years, Claudia (who can never age she is a vampire) becomes angry with Louis and Lestat. Soon, however, Claudia and Louis form an alliance when Claudia discovers that Louis despises Lestat for turning him into a vampire as well. Eventually, Claudia brings about Lestat’s demise, so she and Louis can escape his wrath and travel the world.
After Claudia’s attempt to kill Lestat by burning him, she and Louis travel to Paris in search for others of their kind. After their long search, they meet a host of vampires in a theatre. Their leader is Armand, a vampire that is almost half a millennium old. Armand and Louis soon form a lover’s bond; Armand falls in love with Louis’ conscience-driven personality, while Louis looked up to Armand for his age and his wisdom. Louis replaces Claudia with Armand, and Claudia, consequently, must find a caretaker as a replacement for Louis. Louis creates a female vampire to serve as Claudia’s “mother.”
Eventually, the secret that Claudia committed the ultimate sin and killed one of her own kind leaks out, and the band of French vampires kill both Claudia and her new caretaker. As time passes, Louis’s resentment towards Armand for killing Claudia builds, and he leaves Armand to travel back to New Orleans. Once there, he finds Lestat, who actually escaped the fire, subsisting on rats and cats, no longer living life as lavishly as he used to.
The novel ended when Daniel, the interviewer, asked Louis to transform him into a vampire. Louis, enraged at Daniel for not understanding the essence of his story, bit and left him.
The two most common themes apparent in the story are alienation/detachment and passion. Louis, who previously lived as a mortal human, felt totally detached as a vampire and consequently suffered throughout the story. On one hand, he wanted to understand why he was so detached and alienated from humanity yet still have the ability to feel human emotions. The dilemma, of course, was his need to kill to survive, paired with his morality and personal choice to not kill. Lestat always mocked him for acting human despite being immortal. Countless times throughout the story, Louis wanted to die to be like a mortal human, but felt the obligation to stay for Claudia.
The other prominent theme, sexuality, of course, hits directly on the discussion of gender roles. Gender roles seem to disappear in immortality. Because the vampires can no longer have sexual relations, gender is arbitrary, and choosing ones companion does not relate to sex. In this sense, the vampires are neither heterosexual, homosexual, nor bisexual; I would classify them as omnisexual. In the beginning of the story, Lestat turns Louis into a vampire; he doesn’t explicitly state it, but it is obvious he wants Louis as his mate. When Claudia is turned into a vampire and Louis and her relationship forms, Lestat replaces Louis as his mate with a young male musician. In the novel, they consider the act of drinking blood as the highest form of pleasure and they even compared it to sex. There was a part that Lestat said that he wanted ‘a lady’ for appetizers, an evil-doer as his main course (he didn’t mention if it was male or female) and he wanted ‘handsome youths’ as his dessert. The act of Lestat turning both Louis and the young musician boy into vampires represents taking his relationship to with them to third base; consequently, this act creates a lifelong companion for Lestat.
The arbitrary role of gender in immortality again is seen later in the story when Louis and Armond become companions, as Lestat and Louis were.
Good entry!
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