Hello! Sorry to bother you, I’ve been following you for a while and from your blog I can tell you’re very into the Vampire Chronicles. I just finished Interview with the Vampire and I just started The Vampire Lestat and I’m very confused and I thought you could answer my question if you had the time. I’m very confused because it seems like The Vampire Lestat is set after Interview and Lestat has a VERY different personality than he does during Interview. As I’m reading it doesn’t seem like they are the same person. For example in Interview Lestat is very blood thirsty and only cares for himself but in The Vampire Lestat he waits around for a human to kill, but specifically one whose killed other people and shows no remorse about it. This doesn’t sound like Lestat, more like something Louis would do. Did Anne Rice slightly switch up his personality? It seems like he is a lot more softer than in the last book. Thank you for your time!!
asked by earlysunsetsovermikeyway
I asked permission to make this into a text post because wow, one: it is a common confusion, one that most readers go through, and two: there’s no short answer to it.
For starters, yes, The Vampire Lestat (TVL) takes place after Interview With the Vampire (IWTV), but after the opening of Lestat waking up in the modern world and putting together his band, it jumps back into a flashback that makes up the bulk of the novel–starting with his human life in 16th century France, to his becoming a vampire and onward (I won’t tell you more exact details as spoilers I don’t know how much of it you’ve gotten through yet). By the end of the few hundred page long flashback you’re in present day with his band and the vampires who aren’t too happy about the fact that he’s out there screaming their secrets to the world.
Lestat is much kinder in this one, much more emotional and “softer” as you say, than he is in IWTV because this time he’s the one telling the story. Louis never asked and Lestat never thought to tell the deeper truths and realities of his behavior and Louis chose to believe that he was a villain, because in my opinion, it was the easiest thing for Loius–if he saw Lestat as evil then his hatred of him, his abandonment of him, the hiding of his murder at their daughter’s hands could all e justified. Louis, though claiming he’s not religious, has a highly religious mindset, he’s nearly obsessed with morality thinking that the more he clings to it the more he can also cling to his mortality as well.
Louis told the truth as he saw it, and in his deep melancholia everything he saw was darker than it seemed to be, even without his coping mechanism of coloring everyone around him as dark as he logically could to make himself seem more human by contrast (as the series goes on, Louis becomes fascinating because he is so detached from the vampires, and never uses the powers that vampires gain with age, that he’s just this being of raw power, stronger than most vampires. He becomes by the time of the last book both the most mortal and the least mortal at once out of the coven. He’s terrifying in his complexity, his ruthlessness mirrored in his mercy).
TVL is very much just Lestat going “Hold on! This is NOT what happened, let me tell you MY side of things and you’ll know what REALLY happened,” and if you’ve grown up with siblings or have ever seen an episode of a cartoon/sitcom where the same plot was shown through different points of view but changed the events drastically….that’s what this is. This is Lestat presenting his “I am not an idiot evil drama vamp, I am the endlessly clever just-as-depressed-as-Louis but in different ways Brat Prince.” But he’s also a drama queen.
In fact, he’s such a drama queen (literally, he was an actor once, theatre was his passion) that lying, bending the truth, exaggerating…it all comes second nature to him. I doubt that TVL is the exact truth, I doubt Lestat’s story telling because he–just like Louis, Armand, David, Marius, all of them–are not reliable narrators.
Lestat became my favorite narrator and character in the series by the time that I finished the book, partially because of his flair for the extravagant in his writing. Louis speaks like a slow violin occasionally screaming against the bowstring, firelight, dark red wine, fine black suits and the sound of dust gathering in antique colonial mansions. Lestat speaks like free-flowing drink, a loud symphony orchestra that still has those quiet violins constantly crying away though often overlooked, in the frenzied high of someone addicted to being under the spotlight.
Anne Rice might have decided to change his personality in order to write the second book but her characters are closer to how they’re portrayed in TVL than they are in IWTV (with the exception of Armand–Lestat’s attitude towards Armand is amusing, his claims of hating the little twerp gave me life when reading it the first time).
Thank you so much for asking me, I had a lot of fun answering it, and I hope that I was of some help!
i-want-my-iwtv could probably help as well! the fandom is very kind, active, and open despite its small size and many of them will be more than willing to give their perspective!
ooc; Reblogging because spot on post is spot on. This is how I’ve always described it as well–Louis told his story exactly as he saw it.
annabellioncourt: #PERFECT JUST PERFECT!
None of them are reliable narrators. This is true.
Louis did ask Lestat, often, about Lestat’s maker, their origin as a species, whether vampires were meant to serve Satan, etc. and Lestat had been unable to answer him during IWTV for various reasons that are explained in TVL. The fact that Claudia also asked these questions and was also not given answers was another reason she grew to distrust Lestat, for his refusal to give them even a scrap.
The joke about Lestat calling Louis “Merciful Death!” was because at that time, Louis was so merciful towards humans that he chose animal blood just to avoid taking human life. As Lestat mentions, it’s not living, it’s surviving, to do that, and it certainly contributed to Louis’ gloom and misery during that time period.
I-want-my-IWTV 