Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Interview with the Vampire Pt. 1
So for my blog this week I would like to discuss how the Vampire turned into a vampire. On page 12 he begins by saying, “Well, he drained me almost to the point of death, which was for him sufficient.” Here the Vampire describes how Lestat begins the process of turning him into a vampire. The way that Lestat drains him completely of blood first in one sitting is different from the way we have seen in previous novels. In “Carmilla” and “Dracula” the vampires slowly took blood from their victims and this caused them to also turn into vampires. Then on page 14 he begins to talk about how he felt during the change. I thought this was cool because although we saw this change in previous novels we never saw it this in depth. The first thing that he talks about is his heightened senses. He says, “He stepped close to my bed and leaned down so that his face was in the lamplight, and I saw that he was no ordinary man at all. His grey eyes burned with an incandescence, and the long white hands which hung by his sides were not those of a human being. I think I knew everything in that instant, and all that he told me was only aftermath. What I mean is, the moment I saw him, saw his extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I’d ever known.” I think this is very interesting. The Vampire saw things in a whole new light. This I have seen in many modern vampire stories. A lot of the vampires that are shown today can smell better, are stronger, and can hear better. In the novels they talked about more physical changes the victims had and not the mental ones besides the nightmares.
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I think it is always interesting how the vampires are created. It seems to be a little different in each story. They might be similar but there always seems to be one part at least that they change. I enjoy Twilight's take on it, that the vampire is venemous, and I mentioned in a previous blog that maybe Stephenie Meyers got this idea from I Am Legend. I've always considered the way vampires are turned in Interview with a Vampire to be the "classic" way to turn a human, but this might be because this was the first vampire movie I ever saw.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the more psychological aspect of Louis turning is important and interesting. I say important because this seems to be Louis' stigma throughout book. He cannot be what Lestat wants, a true vampire hunter, because he is using his new "vampire eyes" but still looking at things as a human would. Lestat wants a companion, someone he can share the experiences of being a vampire with, and Louis cannot even embrace what he has become. It seems very ironic.
Nice work! As we have begun our reading on each novel, it has always been a point that I am drawn too. How does this particular author construct his vampire? What portions of vampire myth or lore will he/she use to give life to their creation? In Anne Rice’s is case it is, I would agree, very much like what Jenstick wrote in her comment, “ I've always considered the way vampires are turned in Interview with a Vampire to be the "classic" way to turn a human”. Well said! It struck me the same way. Rice seems to keep the vampire more vanilla (if that is a good word to use), instead choosing to focus her writing on developing a fascinating interplay between Lestat and Louis. An interplay that uses the vampirism as its essential ingredient, but touches on more compelling ways to illustrate these. Such as the sexual desire and the feeling that derives from the ‘feeding’ process. In the other novels, notably I Am Legend the feeding is a base act of survival, in Rice’s novel it is a more sexualized act. Read the excerpt from Louis feeding on Claudia just before she is turned, the lust and passion practically leap of the page. I was equally captivated by the transformation of Louis and how we get to see the profound change that this occasion allows. As you wrote slarson, the other novels never allowed us this glimpse into the transformation. Rice’s descriptions of the transformation turned it from a moment of horror into something that would seem to be pretty cool, at least in a small single dose ;).
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