Interview With the Vampire

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Pages 1-70

Part 1, Pages 70-159

Part 2, Pages 160-201

Part 3, Pages 202-273

Part 3, Pages 273-319

Part 4, Pages 320-343

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Value of Life and Humanity

While he is a mortal, Louis does not value his own life. He says that he moved through life as if he wanted to die but lacked the courage to take his life. He did not believe his life was worth living, which he proves when he submits to Lestat. When Louis says, “I never laugh at death” (16), he speaks with reverence for life itself. The prospect of eternity allows him to cherish the precious nature of each moment of finite lives.

At times, Louis believes becoming a vampire automatically made him evil. However, his vampire instincts are not so different than that of any other predator. This raises the moral question of whether instincts are evil or does evil have to be the result of a choice. In either case, Louis’s self-loathing lends the novel to several styles of critical reading.

The vampires appreciate aesthetics, and while they may look down on humans as their inferiors, they still cling to pieces of human culture and beauty. Vampires did not create the art forms that adorn the catacombs or that appear on the stage in the Theatre des Vampires. Vampires are not responsible for the music Claudia and Lestat play or the books that they read. The artifacts in the Louvre and the paintings in Armand’s catacombs are human creations that elevate even the lives of immortals.

The fleeting nature of life—the transience of humanity—is what gives that life much of its exhilaration. When Louis encounters the Parisian vampires, they are bored and jaded. They make “of immortality a club of fads and cheap conformity” (253). Armand’s vampires are jaded, superficial, cynical, and bored by their immortality. The contemplation of eternity includes the realization that eventually there will be no new experiences. When nothing is novel, nothing is surprising, and a predictable life is more tedious than a life filled with unexpected things and events to appreciate.

Louis clings to his humanity for as long as he can. Claudia’s death starts his final transformation into a creature that Rice portrays as soulless. When Louis voluntarily surrenders his human nature, it is to turn Madeleine into a vampire. He claims that, in that moment, anything human in him died. He then becomes detached, even more aloof and disinterested than Armand, who is weary to the point of longing for death.

Throughout the novel, Louis insists that it is wrong to kill humans, even though he softens his stance at times. He tells Armand, “We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life” (236). The conclusion of the novel is grim, but the fact that Louis does not kill the interviewer and only drains him after attacking suggests that Louis may not have given up on his view of human life as a valuable thing.

Love and Immortality

The various pairings in Interview With the Vampire raise provocative questions about the nature of love. For vampires like Lestat and Armand, the idea of love for a human is itself a lingering piece of human nature. Armand tells Louis that he wants him more than he has ever wanted anything, but his true motivations are that Louis’s curiosity and empathy invigorate him in a way he has not felt in centuries. Throughout the story, there are suggestions that love requires a finite existence to sustain itself. Louis describes Armand to the boy as “the greatest love I’ve ever felt” (60), but that love is not sustainable for Louis as he contemplates the coming centuries at the side of someone whose complicity in his most painful losses turns that love into loathing.

The characters that are bound together in the novel are not partners in traditional, romantic love. Claudia describes the relationship between a maker and a fledgling vampire as one of enslaved and enslaver, prompting the question of whether it is possible to love something that controls you. Claudia’s relationship with Louis, while mutually loving, is problematic. As she ages, although she still looks like a child, Claudia and Louis become more like romantic partners who do not have sex, than platonic, affectionate traveling companions. They are intimate in ways that result from love, even though Claudia claims to hate Louis as much as she loves him.

Lestat mocks Louis for being in love with his mortal nature, but this sort of love is made of nostalgia and remorse. The boy asks Louis if there is a difference between love and adoration when they talk about Louis’s feelings for Babette. Louis says, “I feel love, and I felt some measure of love for Babette” (60). The vampires are sensual, sexualized creatures, but Rice places less emphasis on their sexual desires than the intimacy of mingled blood. When Lestat turns Louis into a vampire, Louis describes the sensations: “The movement of Lestat’s lips sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasures of passion” (19).

Finally, Louis equates the love that one vampire might feel for another with evil:

That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other (316).

Lovers grow familiar with one another but may never know each other entirely. However, intimate relationships that unfold over centuries will likely grow stale as any sense of mystery or spontaneity dwindles.

Existential Questions and the Tedium of Eternity

Louis does not enjoy his life as a human or as a vampire. Despite the interviewer’s enthusiasm for his story, Louis does not view eternal life as a comfort. The search for eternal life has been a staple of many myths, fantasies, and religions, but in these instances, immortality is always something to aspire to, which assumes that it would be peaceful and happy. For Louis, Armand, and other weary vampires, death may be their best chance for peace. In Interview With the Vampire, the immortality of the vampires appears as a blessing or a curse, depending on the ideology and desire of the humans, but Rice presents an endless life as a grueling test of endurance. She prompts the reader to ask whether the fear of death would be worth overriding with the prospect of endless centuries of tedious sameness. At some point, there are no more diversions. Also, the vampires are harder to kill than mortals, but they still must be on guard; they can be destroyed.

Claudia experiences a unique type of dissatisfaction with her deathless existence. Because she became a vampire so young, she never had the experiences the vampires in her life experience as mortal adults. She would forever wonder what it would be like to have a woman’s body and do the things a woman’s body can do. She also lacks the understanding of the contrast between mortality and immortality like those who were turned in adulthood.

Questions about the nature of good and evil plague Louis throughout the story. The thought that he may never have answers, even as millennia pass, is intolerable. He wonders if he is already damned, even as he offers himself to Lestat the first time. Louis is the only vampire who appears to be interested in ethical questions or the possibility of divine beings like God and Satan. However, he seems unaware of his own hypocrisy. It is unlikely that Louis would say that committing a good act automatically makes one a good person. Yet, he is willing to assume that he is evil, or damned, because he commits an act—becoming a vampire—that might be evil. When Babette says he is from the devil, Louis is more willing to be convinced by her fears than by the lack of evidence for God or the devil. When Armand highlights this inconsistency for him, Louis still can’t find comfort in the ambivalence, and the ambivalence about his identity may never end. As he tells Babette, “I do not know whether I come from the devil or not. I don’t know what I am…I am to live to the end of the world, and I do not even know what I am!” (70).

Despite his age, Armand is a poor advertisement for the benefits of an immortal life. He clings to Louis in hopes that he will find relief from the prospect of the numbing centuries to come. His remark that most vampires die of suicide vindicates Louis’s feelings about what vampires deserve, and he hopes the interviewer would have drawn the same conclusions. However, the boy would rather experience the life of a vampire than take Louis’s story as wisdom. The idea of immortality is intoxicating enough to him that he believes Louis must be mistaken or an ungrateful outlier.