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Loneliness vs. Companionship
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Interview with the Vampire, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Interview with the Vampire presents a version of the modern American vampire, which is markedly different from the European vampire stories of the past. Although the figure of the vampire dates back further than Dracula, Bram Stoker’s iconic novel defined the vampire for much of the 20th century. Although there was some variation in how various authors presented their vampires, they tended to adhere to certain tropes. For instance, vampires were afraid of garlic, and one could kill them with a stake through the heart. Additionally, most vampires in fiction prior to Rice’s novel were villains rather than nuanced characters with moral sensibilities. Right away, Rice differentiates the modern vampire—best characterized by Louis—from the vampires of the past. Louis explains to the boy interviewing him that neither garlic, artificial light, nor stakes through the heart frighten him. Although Rice’s vampires retain some of the clichés (sleeping in coffins, for example), there is little in them that resembles Dracula.
More traditional vampires nevertheless make an appearance in Interview with the Vampire. Louis and Claudia travel to Eastern Europe where they visit Transylvania, the home of Dracula, where the old world vampires are said to live. Eventually, Louis and Claudia find these ancient European vampires and are deeply disappointed. These vampires are nothing more than mindless husks, motivated only by their desire for blood. Louis and Claudia kill these vampires easily and eventually stop searching for them, thinking them useless. With this, the novel seems to suggest that while vampire tales of the past certainly have their place as terrifying monster stories, it’s perhaps more compelling to humanize the monsters and use these terrifying, immortal, and yet sympathetic beings to explore questions about what it means to be human.
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Reinventing the Vampire ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Reinventing the Vampire appears in each part of Interview with the Vampire. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Reinventing the Vampire Quotes in Interview with the Vampire
Below you will find the important quotes in Interview with the Vampire related to the theme of Reinventing the Vampire.
Part 1, Pages 1-70
Quotes
“What manner of man he’d been in life, I couldn’t tell and didn’t care; but he was for all appearances of the same class now as myself, which meant little to me, except that it made our lives run a little more smoothly than they might have otherwise. He had impeccable taste, though my library to him was a ‘pile of dust,’ and he seemed more than once to be infuriated by the sight of my reading a book or writing some observations in a journal. ‘That’s mortal nonsense,’ he would say to me, while at the same time spending so much of my money to splendidly furnish Pointe du Lac, that even I, who cared nothing for the money, was forced to wince.”
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Part 2
Quotes
“I lay against the wall, staring at the thing, the blood rushing in my ears. Gradually I realized that Claudia knelt on his chest, that she was probing the mass of hair and bone that had been his head. She was scattering the fragments of his skull. We had met the European vampire, the creature of the Old World. He was dead.”
Part 4
Quotes
And quickly the boy noted:
“Lestat…off St. Charles Avenue. Old house crumbling…shabby neighborhood. Look for rusted railings.”
And then, stuffing the notebook quickly in his pocket, he gathered the tapes into his briefcase, along with the small recorder, and hurried down the long hallway and down the stairs to the street, where in front of the corner bar his car was parked.
