Ecstasy. From the Greek ekstasis. Meaning not what you think. Meaning not euphoria or sexual climax or even happiness. Meaning literally: a state of displacement, of being driven out of one’s senses.
“She was Gabrielle. And all her life came to her defense, the years and years of suffering and loneliness, the waste in those damp, hollow chambers to which she’d been condemned, and the books that were her solace, and the children who devoured her and abandoned her, and the pain and disease, her final enemy, which had, in promising release, pretended to be her friend.. Beyond words and images there came the secret thudding of her passion, her seeming madness, her refusal to despair.”
You’re so welcome, glad you enjoyed it! Answering asks is so much fun for me, it makes me consider my own current and previous thoughts, sometimes I even ask around privately for more ideas… and try to write it out as best I can, it gives me an excuse to make fresh gifs/memes, sometimes it inspires others to make fanworks… and I always like to hear back from the original asker that the effort was appreciated *u* ((No, you only get one question per quarter. Pffft. Of course you can ask more!))
“in general, how do we as a base know what is unreliable information or not when it comes to our narrators because from what I’ve always gathered, they have the earnest desire to convey the truth as they can see it.”
You would think that, but just like in real life, people can narrate a story for their own motivations.
TL;DR:
The characters telling their stories don’t always have the earnest desire to convey the truth, so it’s not always clear what the reliable information is! When we have accounts of the same event where the details align, that seems to be the best way to confirm it’s canon, bc even Anne Rice can’t always answer fan’s questions about canon stuff to everyone’s satisfaction.
When there’s conflicting details, we have to rely on headcanons, which ppl can choose to agree on or not, hence the fandom phrase, #Your Headcanon May Vary.
For example of facts aligning: I think we can all agree that Armand was the unspoken leader at the Theatre des Vampires bc Lestat left him there in a position of authority in TVL, which is where Louis found him some 80 years later in IWTV, confirming that that was Armand’s role there.
In the scene above,
IDK at that point in canon whether Lestat believes in a God, but if not, he’s deliberately lying to Claudia, bc she’s never going to see her mother again. Even if he does believe in God, he still doesn’t know where his dead go! He’s trying to answer her in a way that will keep her calm and complacent. He knows Claudia’s mother is dead, he saw the corpse in the movie. But she is still a child and he doesn’t want to scare her or depress her, or make her feel guilty about killing, which she just did!
I also think he’s a little taken aback bc she’s asking him for the whereabouts of her biological mother just minutes after he turned her into a vampire, a process that’s been compared to birth. It’s the most intimate act a vampire can experience. His smile falls right after she asks bc in a way it seems like he’s a deflated that she wants her biological mother, it’s like she’s already saying, “You’re not my REAL dad!” It might also remind him of his own mother who abandoned him ;A;
Re: Lestat P.1: In TVL, Lestat tells Armand:
“I never lie,” I said offhand. “At least not to those I don’t love.”
I’m still not 100% clear on this, bc of the double negatives. Can we translate it to “I’m honest with those I don’t love.” –> “I lie to those I love.” ? He spent some 65 years lying by omission to Louis and Claudia about the other vampires, and all the secrets he knew. So who’s to say he doesn’t also lie to his readers, “those I don’t love” ? How much does he really love his readers?
Re: Louis: I’ve always felt, and there are others who share this opinion, who gave me this opinion, that IWTV was dictated to Daniel from Louis with the intention of pissing Lestat off enough that he would rise from wherever he was hiding and find Louis. While I don’t think Louis intentionallyLIED, I do think he might have embellished some things, exaggerated here and there, left out certain things, in order to achieve his goal. And it WORKED because…
Re: Lestat P.2: The Vampire Lestat was Lestat’s rebuttal to IWTV, containing all the secrets he couldn’t tell Louis during their time together, so I’m inclined to believe that Lestat earnestly wanted to correct the record and win Louis back, since he still loved Louis.
Re: Armand: TBH, I don’t know Armand’s story well enough, what I believe and what I don’t, in all of canon, to say that he’s a liar. I think, like Louis and Lestat, he embellishes, he lies by omission, and he tells people things when he wants a certain reaction out of them. He lied to his coven when he was a leader all those years since he never really believed in serving Satan. Or did he? It seems like he didn’t.
There is a particular scene that Armand describes in TVA that is questionable, as to whether it happened.
How he tried to “help” Claudia the night she died (fanart by @sheepskeletonhere, if you dare, it’s gorey). Personally, I sometimes believe it’s the truth bc Armand does like… experiments! But then I also remember how David was flirting excessively with Armand in that book, andso it’s possible that “this story was just something that Armand made up; somehow trying to intimidate the others, displaying the cruelty he could be capable of.” (quote from @annabellioncourt)
Louis does not approve of making vampires himself, that’s for sure! But yes, Louis wanted to be with Armand and Armand didn’t want Claudia as part of that equation and she knew it.
So, right, IDK what Louis was thinking about how it could possibly work out w/o making her a new adult vampire companion. He had little choice in that. He couldn’t bear to think of her out there on her own, she clearly wasn’t going to be invited to join the Theatre des Vampires, and she couldn’t make an adult vampire herself. There was a line in book!IWTV where she tells Louis: “ ‘Can you picture it?’ she said, so softly I scarcely heard. “A coven of children? That is all I could provide…” <– whether she could actually turn a child is not known. We don’t know of it happening successfully anywhere else in canon before or after that point. Louis probably would not have approved of that, either.
Worth noting here is that in the first version of IWTV, Claudia wasn’t killed off by the Parisian coven (from the Vampire Companion):
“In the first version of [IWTV], Claudia eventually goes off with three vampire brothers whom she meets in Paris. She does not die. As such, it was as if Rice had attempted to give her daughter a form of immortality. Rice, however, experienced psychological problems that cleared up only after she had rewritten the ending – by killing off Claudia and taking Louis through an experience of intense grieving. This version was much more cathartic for Rice.”
Hello! I have thought about this, probably thought about it TOO much… and while I don’t a clear answer, it’s a stimulating question:
Was this young ‘nurse’ vampire a fledgling of Lestat’s?
^How does the old fandom joke go? Every time X sound occurs, Lestat makes another fledgling? *facepalm*
I agree w/ your point about re: Antoine, it seems like Lestat or Antoine would have confirmed that it was in fact Antoine who was the unnamed young vampire in that scene in IWTV.
TL;DR: We have unreliable narrators** in BOTH Lestat and Louis*. I personally don’t think that the unnamed ‘nurse’ vampire in this scene was made by Lestat, but it’s quite possible! Lestat has never mentioned him again in canon, but we might find out about him in the next novel.
Hit the jump for more, cut for length.
This is an excerpt from the scene
in IWTV (the book, not in the movie) w/ the unnamed young vampire @terryfphanatics is asking about:
“Because shortly after that I saw a vampire in New Orleans, a sleek white-faced young man walking alone on the broad sidewalks of St. Charles Avenue…” (this mystery vampire kills a woman and takes her baby to a shabby old house where he meets up with Lestat) “My eyes widened as I studied this stooped and shivering vampire whose rich blond hair hung down in loose waves covering his face…
… “ ‘You all leave me!’ [Lestat] whined now in a thin, high-pitched voice.
‘You can’t keep us with you!’ said the stiff young vampire sharply.”
(Louis taps at the window)
…“ ‘It’s Louis! Louis!’ [Lestat] said. `Let him in’ And he gestured frantically, like an invalid, for the young `nurse’ to obey. … and I could see the tears welling in his eyes…How baffling and awful it was, this smoothfaced, shimmering immortal man bent and rattled and whining like a crone.”
So yes, Lestat might have made this ‘nurse’ vampire as Marius made Bianca, a dedicated fledgling vampire to help him in his recovery.
As with the previously unnamed musician vampire in IWTV – who later became known as Antoine in PL – I used to headcanon that
Lestat couldn’t bear to even mention the musician vampire’s name in later canon bc he was either A) an embarrassment to Lestat or B) that they had broken up violently, C) both, D) the musician vampire had really been killed by Claudia, or E) other reasons. This unnamed young ‘nurse’ vampire might fall under A, B, C, or E. Or maybe someone else has killed him since then *shrugs*
When Lestat says: ‘You all leave me!’ – ;A; This could be about his fledglings, bc, yes, when you take TVL into account, up to this point in canon all four have chosen to leave him: Gabrielle, Nicolas, Louis & Claudia (at this point in canon, the unnamed musician vampire appeared to have been destroyed). Armand’s warnings to Lestat about making fledglings
in TVL are relevant:
“Oh, but it’s always a travesty, don’t you see?… And the veil will always come down between you. Make a legion. You will be, always and forever, alone!
If the ‘nurse’ vampire was not made by Lestat: It also would have been possible for a rogue vampire to find Lestat, perceive that he was an older vampire, and might have wisdom or power, or the rogue had heard of the legendary Lestat, and come in search of him purposely. I feel like this is more likely given how beaten down Lestat was from the assassination attempt and his survival of the Theatre des Vampires in such close proximity.
THEN we have THIS (also from IWTV, prior to the scene excerpted above):
“[Armand] told me something he’d concealed from me since the time we were in Paris.
“Lestat had not died in the Theatre des Vampires. I had believed him to be dead, and when I asked Armand about those vampires, he told me they all had perished. But he told me now that this wasn’t so. Lestat had left the theater the night I had run away from Armandand sought out the cemetery in Montmartre. Two vampires who had been made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking passage to New Orleans.”
^Like…. WHAT?
Maybe Armand had heard it through the grapevine that Lestat had these two caretakers, but since Lestat never mentions having siblings in the blood from Magnus, it’s possible that Armand is lying so that Louis thinks Lestat already has enough support and doesn’t need a THIRD caretaker.
Or, of course, Anne Rice either A) forgot about these two sibling vampires or B) chose not to address them. They would probably both have been too old to be the “young nurse vampire” but… MAYBE WE’LL GET THEM IN THE NEXT BOOK WHO KNOWS? Anything! is possible!
*Further complicated by the fact that Louis’s story went through Daniel and Daniel’s publishers, who may have added misinformation of their own for a better story! Reprehensible that this young vampire would bring Lestat a baby as a victim, but in Lestat’s defense, he doesn’t want it: “ ‘You might have brought me something else!’ said Lestat bitterly.”
That’s good that the police are concerned for your safety and have offered to give you & your crew a safe ride home! Yes, I would think that Armand does get this kind of interaction,
more because if the fact that he was under 21 when he was turned and not so much bc of the vampire beauty (from TVA):
I would never be anything but the seventeen-year-old boy you see now… [but] I am not a waif and never have been. I am a strong child.
Even if he looked “strong,” I’m an adult and it would concern me to see a 17 year old out in a bar late at night, too! I wouldn’t approach him myself, but I might worry that he’s in danger and alert a staff member. From my experience in many states in the US, it is a liability for a bar or club to have underage people even in their building, so most don’t even allow underage people in at all.
Armand probably has a big deck of fake ID’s that say he’s 21, though, and some people really do look younger than they are… combine that with his Mind Whammy abilities, so I’m sure he gets in wherever he wants.
We’re all selective as to what canon we’re willing to accept anyway so even those who have read TOBT and/or MTD don’t necessarily accept one or both as canon. Some ppl insist that everything published is canon. But here’s the thing, there’s “the two crossover novels Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle, which Rice herself has now disavowed,” (X@sanguinivora) so like, even AR doesn’t demand that we accept everything as canon. At least that’s my own take on it.
TOBT: No spoilers. I don’t think Armand or Daniel are even mentioned in TOBT (I don’t have a copy nearby to check). But in their absence, it would appear that they were either A) unaware of what was happening w/ Lestat, or B) unwilling to help him. I don’t remember that ever being really developed, but Lestat does mention sometimes how it seemed like no one was WILLING to help, that they all were aware and left him to fend for himself.
HUGE SPOILER IN MTD under the cut, you have been warned.
MTD has alot of baggage bc there were those negative reviews that came out about it, and tbh I didn’t read them bc there was an avalanche of them, so I don’t know if any of them were fair or not, but I remember that AR made alot of fiery public response about it (to put it lightly) and was using her FB POTP army against any critical reviewers, it was a dark time, so that may have soured the fandom on that book a lot.
MTD was published in 1995 and it was supposed to be the LAST book in the series. 3 years later we got The Vampire Armand, because…………….
*****HUGE SPOILER*****
*****YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED*****
At the end of MTD, Armand believes that Lestat really went to Heaven and Hell when shown a particular piece of evidence, and Armand chooses to go out into the sunlight, and die:
“I will bear witness. I will stand here with my arms outstretched,” [Armand] cried, “and when
the sun rises, my death shall confirm the miracle.”
I-want-my-IWTV 