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Insurriaga

Maria Insurriaga

U of U Writing

Erin Rogers

09 December 2016

The Vampire Lestat from the Vampire Chronicles, is a fictional character that was first

introduced in Interview with a Vampire back in 1976. Throughout The Vampire Chronicles series

he is the one who mainly narrates what is happening in the novels starting with The Vampire

Lestat. People see how he feels and thinks about being a vampire through the 200 years he has

been alive in The Vampire Lestat. When reading the book you see that Lestat is like a transition

from the old vampire ways of seeing things to this new kind of era in 1800 century France, when

the greatest philosophers were sitting around cafes talking about the new ways of thinking and

stuff, and in the book you can see how it also affects the way the Vampires have started to

change. Lestat gets changed into a Vampire at the ending of one era into a new one just a little

before the French Revolution. Vampires have been depicted differently through time and the

Vampire Lestat is a good example of such changes. Presently Vampires have been seen more like

humans and have disregarded the old ways and are more cool and romanticized, and this kind of

stuff is seen through pop culture with movies, books, tv, etc. The concept of the vampire has

changed a lot through time. They developed from more monstrous/satanic beings into relatable

outcasts in a way. Although there seems to be a good vampire and a bad vampire thing going

on recently since the 20th century but vampires have become more advanced and elaborate

beings, and Lestat is a good example of that.

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The Vampire Lestat has been changing ever since he was first introduced 1976. Through the

series you see how the world he is in affects his self concept and of other vampires around him.

In Interview with the vampire hes seen as a more villainous character to Louis (one of the people

Lestat changed into a vampire), and for good reason: Lestat killed two, sometimes three a night.

A fresh young girl, that was his favorite for the first of the evening. For seconds, he preferred a

gilded beautiful youth.(Rice 46). It shows how Louis saw Lestat as a killer. Lestat also plays

with his victims and he also creates a vampire child so Louis would stay with him. Lestat is the

opposite of Count Dracula from Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, in some ways because, Lestat has

atheistic views and is always questioning if God is real. Early on in the book Lestat hands his

father a rosary, as his father is dying (Rice 23), and in that moment Rice disregards the common

conventions about religion seen in Stoker's Dracula. Count Dracula has a hatred for God, he is

hurt by religious things such as crosses and holy water. Dracula believes he is dammed, whereas

Lestat doesnt believe in that, he believes that vampires just have to cope with the concept of it:

Lestats one lesson he tried to teach Louis was that they were beyond damnation. If they were

damned, then why does God allow them to roam the earth without confinement?(Tadlock).

Lestat isnt affected by those things because his character was created during the late 20th

century: Every age embraces the vampire it needs(Auerbach 145). That speaks true because In

The Vampire Lestat which is the book after Interview with the Vampire, Lestat wakes up from a

long sleep under the ground because he heard the sound of Rock music. It lures him to the 1980s

world. He discovers that people dont believe in superstitions much less in vampires, people

dress up as them which fascinates Lestat. Of course he embraces that time period because

Religion isnt as intense as it used to be when he went underground. Lestat wanted to let people
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know who he was so he decided to form his own rock band with humans, and he wanted the

world to know about him. It reminded him of when he used to be a part of a theater in Paris. He

was successful, he gained the attention of several people. He gained the attention of vampires all

over the world, who got angry at him for putting himself out there publicly, something no one

had done before, except for Louis of course.

Although he has significant differences with Dracula, both of the books that they are from

have a similar gothic genre: the moral and emotional ambiguity and search for meaning that

more strongly characterize the modern Gothic enable characters like Lestat to work through evil

and darkness to arrive at a personal moral code that can help him attain some sort of

victory( Galloway). In the gothic genre there are characters who are alienated in several ways

and in these type of dark works people express their cultural fears as what people desire

(Vampire for our times). Lestat character is trying to make meaning and is always searching for

answers and the gothic genre is all about those kinds of ideas.

Being an immortal, the character Lestat is still alive and well and with how the world is

changing the author finds it easy to put an immortal into the world we live in, which is one that is

always evolving, making Lestats character evolve as well. Lestat is a relatable character in many

ways: The vampire is a powerful metaphor for the outsider, for the isolated, alienated suffering

soul in each of us, and for the predator in each of us, and people of all ages respond to that

metaphor(Rice). That is why Lestat keeps coming back because he is relatable to people since

the day his character was created until now and perhaps in the future as well.

All of a sudden vampires became cool, people had never seen a vampire like Lestat, Louis,

and Claudia, after the movie Interview with the vampire came out (Our Cultures Obsession with
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Vampires). Vampires were deemed to be cool not so much ugly and scary like Count Dracula,

Lesters character is beautiful, he has blond hair and blue eyes, and its was on of the reason he

got turned into a Vampire. Interview with the Vampire is unarguably what inspired other Vampire

works and Lestats character definitely inspired other Vampire characters. When the 90s came

The Vampire Diaries also came out with cool vampires, Then Buffy the vampire slayer aired as

well, and both had characters similar to Lestat. Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer embraced

being a vampire, he doesn't feel guilty about killing for blood and that is how Lestat feels in

Interview with the Vampire. Lestat believes that its in their nature. Another way the influence of

Lestat is shown in Buffy the vampire slayer is when Spike expresses his affection for Buffy:

Come on. I can feel it, Slayer. You know you wanna dance. but then Buffy says, Say it's true.

Say I do want to. It wouldn't be you, Spike. It would never be you. You're beneath me.(Fool for

Love), so like Louis from Interview with a Vampire, she denies Spike because he is evil and she

believes Spike cannot love her because of what he is, just like how Louis wants to leave Lestat,

since Louis sees Lestat as an evil being. Lestat gets greatly attached to Louis like Spike gets

attached to Buffy. The depiction of Spike is similar to Lestat's character, because both are

lonely(Vampires and the Soul). There was also a gothic band which was formed because of the

influence of Lestat in pop culture. The bands name was Lestat, they released their first album

titled Theatre of the Vampires In 1988 three year after the novel The Vampire Lestat came out.

That was the name of the theatre Lestat owned after becoming a Vampire.

In interview with the vampire, both in the movie and the book people see how Lestat is an evil

vampire the opposite of Louis, the narrator of tInterview with the vampire, we watch only one

side of the things that have happened during that time in New Orleans in which the book takes
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place. In The Vampire Lestat we get a chance to see Lestat's side of the story which is definitely

different than what Louis had said. Lestat shares his beginnings and how he believed in the

goodness of people and the bad in them. He became friends with a cynical man named Nicholas

who believes that they are evil for running away to Paris and not following their christian faith,

and Lestat is also wrong in not following his Christian faith. We learn that Lestat has atheist

views and he tries to convince Nicholas that he has goodness inside of him when he plays his

violin, but Nicholas is too dark to agree with Lestat, when Lestat says: Was this what he

believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the

violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant

nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the despair

finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and a beauty then was a horrid irony(Rice 66), here we

see Lestat thinking about how different he and Nicholas thought, and it gives readers the impression

of how hopeful Lestat was as when he says:Beauty wasn't the treachery he imagined it to be(Rice

66). Here we see what Lestat believes in: Good and evil, those are concepts man has

made(Rice) He feels strong and doesn't fall into despair, later in the book he tells his mother, I

dont believe in anything and that makes me stronger than you think(Rice). Here he is referring

to faith and this shows how letting go of things, he is stronger because he has developed his own

belief in what is good and evil. Lestat defends his behavior and tells the readers how he isnt

really the monster Louis made him out to be.

In search of why we are all here Lestat tries to find answers as to why vampires were made and

the reason for why people are here on earth. He searches for Marius who is said to be one of the

oldest vampires ever. When he finds him, Marius tells him everything he knows and tells him

about the oldest vampires one them being Akasha. He learns that she is trying to start war with
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humans, so he vows to warn the mortals about it. She knows what he is going to do so she shows

up at his rock concert and essentially kidnaps him. In the third book The Queen of the damned,

Lestat tries to stop her because he believes what she wants to do is wrong. Here we see how his

character has evolved: Lestat is a monster who survives by murdering humans, yet gains the

reader's sympathies because he deplores what he is and agonizes over how to become a "good"

vampire; he is a killer with a conscience. As already mentioned, Lestat's dilemma also evokes the

theme of dualism or the double: He is both the hero and the monster, the demonic is generated

from within(Galloway). This makes sense because he is first seen as this bad vampire and

later as the series progresses he is seen as the good vampire for several reasons, one of them

being that he doesnt want Akasha to ruin mankind.

Lestat journey in the world has yet to end, his character still have a massive importance to this

day. Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis was published November 29th of this year. There is

also talk of bringing The Vampire Chronicles back to life through a television series, in an

interview the author stated, Were in the planning stage right now. Emails are flying back and

forth with all our different ideas about how we want to do it. Nothing is firm yet, except that we

do want to start with the second book in the series, The Vampire Lestat. We want to start with

him and his birth as a vampire, and go on from there(Rice).

Through Lestat's journey for meaning readers can see through his eyes what all of the time he

has been alive has meant to him and what his beliefs are, also how in the beginning readers saw

him as this bad vampire but later on saw the good vampire in him as well. Vampires have

become much more elaborate during the late 20th century closer to humans than ever before, and
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perhaps in the future works, human characters in t.v series and books might fully integrate

Vampires into society without fear.

"Welcome To Anne Rice.com!" Welcome To Anne Rice.com! N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2016.

Galloway, Shirley. "The Vampire Lestat." The Vampire Lestat. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.

@EW. "Anne Rice Details New 'Vampire Chronicles' TV Series and Reveals Her Dream Cast."

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Vampire Chronicles.

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