madshelley:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ending of Memnoch the Devil lately. More specifically, about how I’ve seen people dismiss Armand’s attempted suicide along with the rest of the book, as it being too out of character or too far into the realm of “later canon” to be worthy of much attention.

But the thing is, the young me that read MtD for the first time and had no access to the internet wasn’t able to do ~research~ and obsess over what Anne might have intended with this thing or the other, which meant that I was completely free to interpret everything I read in any way that I wanted.

So when I read about Armand running into the sun after hearing Lestat’s story, my mind went straight to that quote from Queen of the Damned: “’I’ll tell you what I fear,’ Armand had said, intense as any young student. ‘That it’s chaos after you die, that it’s a dream from which you can’t wake. Imagine drifting half in and out of consciousness, trying vainly to remember who you are or what you were. Imagine straining forever for the lost clarity of the living.’“

And so I saw Armand as someone who had lost the will to live centuries ago, and was simply going on out of fear that there was nothing after death. And I saw Lestat’s “revelation” that there was as the push that finally gave him the courage to end it. I still can’t completely shake off that interpretation and it still breaks my heart.