The fact that all the Vampire Chronicles exist in meta form within the Vampire Chronicles is actually so fucking genius and I think AR gave us a beautiful gift with which we will always be able to hand wave away any plot holes or characterizations that deviate from the norm.
Continuity error? The narrator remembers the events differently.
OOC behavior? The narrator is too dense to properly interpret someone’s feelings.
The sudden inclusion of a phrase she really likes all over the book from various people’s mouths? (ie: Lord God!) It’s not ANNE saying these words, it’s the characters picking up each other’s mannerisms.
It’s created a rich breeding ground for all types of discourse and headcanons, and we never have to be truly heartbroken by critique cause there’s always the possibility that Lestat is just being a jackass and doesn’t know wtf he’s talking about.
It also creates this beautiful sense of suspending disbelief in that the characters are all “real”
Tag Archives: unreliable narrator
The fact that all the Vampire Chronicles exist in meta form within the Vampire Chronicles is actually so fucking genius and I think AR gave us a beautiful gift with which we will always be able to hand wave away any plot holes or characterizations that deviate from the norm.
Continuity error? The narrator remembers the events differently.
OOC behavior? The narrator is too dense to properly interpret someone’s feelings.
The sudden inclusion of a phrase she really likes all over the book from various people’s mouths? (ie: Lord God!) It’s not ANNE saying these words, it’s the characters picking up each other’s mannerisms.
It’s created a rich breeding ground for all types of discourse and headcanons, and we never have to be truly heartbroken by critique cause there’s always the possibility that Lestat is just being a jackass and doesn’t know wtf he’s talking about.
Oh, I have a question about the hair thing! Armand’s hair keeps changing… in IWTV Louis says it’s straight, in QoTD Khayman says it’s straight, but then it’s definitely curly TVA (and I think in TVL as well?). Do you think different characters perceive it differently, or Anne can’t remember/make up her mind? Or, given curling irons weren’t invented yet, maybe it’s straight but sometimes he sleeps in his coffin in curlers…
Let’s be real here, AR probably forgot how she had described it or hadn’t decided on how it should be, bc IIRC it’s only those two instances in all of canon that it’s described as straight, and those were in books 1 and 3, while she might still have been developing him as a character.
IIRC, Armand’s hair is described as curly when he was mortal and when he was a fledgling, so I think that’s the natural state of it. I don’t recall him ever mentioning straightening it, but when it’s mentioned in IWTV, it’s the 1970′s, and in QOTD, it’s the 1980′s, so he had access to straightening products if he felt like straightening his hair.
^X @amadeo-child-of-the-renaissance found this, another Botticelli angel Armand 😉 AR bases Armand off these Botticelli angels and they have varying straight and curly hair.
Btw ik he’s not in the fic but I meant Armand was a little bitch just because of the whole Nicki thing. And I agree with you that Nicki was mentally ill but Armand probably didn’t help him at all my torturing him. And I freaking loved Nicki, I cried when he died. If Armand hadn’t have done that, would Nicki had lived on? Maybe not, but still.
Ah, okay. Nicolas had a rough time in canon, sadly ;A;
[^X Nicolas by @unionthesalmon – plz reblog from X or the source]
“Armand was a little bitch just because of the whole Nicki thing.” – Armand may have been trying to help Nicki in the ways he knew how. Armand had been a coven master for hundreds of years, dealt with madness from many ages of vampires, maybe this was something that helped in other cases. It could be seen as cruel from our mortal standards, but maybe that was considered a reasonable form of treatment for vampires.
We only have the account of Nicolas and Armand’s interactions in Eleni’s letters and very little is said. No one ever brings it up again (unless they do in PLROA, which I still haven’t finished), and since we only have the one account, I can’t jump to the conclusion that Armand was definitely torturing Nicki. He can be cruel, but Lestat asked him to take good care of Nicki, and I feel like Armand tried to do the right thing.
“And I agree with you that Nicki was mentally ill” – Some ppl headcanon that he was, and I don’t know what I think about that, but again, maybe Armand was trying to treat the illness and save Nicki!
“And I freaking loved Nicki, I cried when he died. If Armand hadn’t have done that, would Nicki had lived on? Maybe not, but still.” – If we go by my theory that Armand was trying to help him, maybe Armand’s treatment prolonged Nicki’s life. We just don’t know.
If Armand was really torturing Nicki, I think we would have found out more about it in TVA, or some other book, or Lestat would have confronted Armand about it.
But whether Armand really antagonized Nicolas to his death or not, Nicolas had enough reason on his own to end badly even before Armand got involved… as Nicolas tells Lestat, it was his intention all along to fail:
“All a misunderstanding, my love, ” he said. Acid on the tongue.
The blood sweat had broken out again, and his eyes glistened as if they
were wet. “It was to hurt others, don’t you see, the violin playing, to
anger them, to secure for me an island where they could not rule.
They would watch my ruin, unable to do anything about it.” I didn’t
answer. I wanted him to go on.“And when we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in
Paris, that we would go down and down and down. It was what I
wanted, rather than what they wanted, that I, the favored son, should
rise for them. I thought we would go down! We were supposed to go
down.”
Perhaps becoming a vampire was not the cure for that intention/feeling/illness, and it just magnified the self-destruction he already felt ;A;
Hi! So, I was reading an analysis about homosexuality in the vampire genre, and the autor talks about Lestat and Louis relationship in IWTV, and says this: “Louis and Lestat are a couple and have specific roles in a relationship. Louis is feminized, presented as passive, delicate and sensitive, and speaks about his feelings at some length. Lestat’s masculinity is strongly emphasized; the consummate hunter, he is aggressive, arrogant and unfeeling.’ ( Pt 1/2 )
The author reinforce this by adding that, when they adopted Claudia, Louis took the maternal role. What do you think? ( Pt 2/2 )
It’s not a groundbreaking concept, we often talk of mommy!Louis in fandom. If there were a “mom” in that relationship, Louis would be more of that than Lestat was! ❤
[X by @ofallingstar, but I brightened it]
#don’t you love the way Claudia snuggles in there #tucks herself in #like she’s actually Louis’ doll? #she is 80% made of that dress and those curls #how he places that little kiss on top of her head right before he shuts the lid #Right before theyll be in total darkness #just to reassure her #He is such a good mom
^my tags on that gif, bc I do love mommy!Louis ❤
(Lestat was actually Claudia’s biological maker, it’s his blood that turns her; she is technically Lestat’s fledgling, which actually makes Louis her “brother”!)
Louis was based on Anne Rice herself; Lestat was based on her husband, Stan; and Claudia on her own daughter, Michele, so you could say Louis was the “mom” bc of who he was based on. IWTV was partly about AR investigating the tragic loss of her own daughter through these characters. Louis’ separation from Claudia was not his choice; neither was AR’s from her own daughter ;A;
When you’re a Ricean vampire, gender doesn’t really matter, it definitely doesn’t matter physically in making new vampires, which is how they procreate. Post-IWTV!Lestat is much more into fashion, jewelry, and other typically “feminine-specific” stuff/activities that Louis has little or no tolerance for. Lestat is also one of the most prolific makers we know of in the series. The act of making fledglings could be compared to pregnancy, and he loves doing it, so that could make him more “feminine” than Louis, who has only made two fledglings (but both were made under duress, not 100% his choice).
Lestat and Louis both parented her in their own ways. Lestat took Claudia out and taught her to hunt, and all this other stuff he shared with her that Louis couldn’t. Hunting can be considered more “masculine.” You could label more domestic things like literature “feminine,” I guess, and that’s what Louis offered her. IWTV!Lestat was just more interested in action and less interested in introspection. Your author says that one of Louis’ feminine traits is “speaking about his feelings,” Lestat does TONS of that in later books. So if you only read IWTV, you miss out on that.
The other thing is that IWTV is Louis’ account, so yes, it paints Lestat a certain way, when Lestat was frustrated that he couldn’t reveal so many secrets that it drove a wedge between them. I feel like most of Lestat’s “masculine” behavior is just about that frustration, at having to keep his history a secret because of Marius’s threats.
As Lestat puts it in TVL, Louis’ account is somewhat accurate:
“…which for all its contradictions and terrible
misunderstandings manages to capture the atmosphere in which Claudia and Louis and I came together and stayed together for sixty-five
years…
But he adds this about Louis as a narrator:
“[Louis’] blindness to
the motives or the suffering of others was as much a part of his charm
as his soft unkempt black hair or the eternally troubled expression in
his green eyes.
So I wouldn’t say you can totally define Lestat and Louis’ gender roles in their relationship based solely on reading IWTV. But many of us, myself included, enjoy daydreaming about mommy!Louis ❤
If the scene didn’t take place at all how did Louis get such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition? If I recall correctly Armand mostly spent time with Lestat after he and Louis had parted and even if he had visited once before why would he give Louis the full disclosure? It’s not like Louis can take images from Armand’s mind either. Louis might have exaggerated the patheticness of the conversation to get a reaction from Lestat but it’s hard for me to believe that they didn’t meet at all
Re: @firelight-fading‘s post: “How many of you actually feel that Louis’ visiting Lestat at the end of IWTV and the conversation that followed actually happened? Lestat insists that it didn’t, but both him and Louis are unreliable narrators…”
Hey, look, you are free to believe in whichever unreliable narrator you want! Clearly we don’t all agree on this. I still don’t know what I believe, but I lean towards it happening, that they met, just maybe not as Louis described it.
Anon says: If the scene didn’t take place at all how did Louis get such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition?…
It’s not like Louis can take images from Armand’s mind either.
^Louis had seen a pretty battered Lestat around 1865, and then he thought Lestat was destroyed in the TdV fire, so he’s probably guessing that his maker looks like toast now, if he’s in fact still alive.
Lestat acknowledges in TVL that Armand came around to pester him in NOLA, which, yes, is presumably after Armand and Louis went their separate ways. But Armand could have visited Lestat before that separation, or gotten the information from another vampire who had seen Lestat in NOLA. They’re probably not the only vampires in New York during the time that they’re there.
Anon says: even if he had visited once before why would he give Louis the full disclosure? In IWTV, Armand tells Louis that Lestat is in NOLA:
“Then, finally, Armand urged me in another way. He 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 Armand and 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.
^So how Armand knew this, we don’t know, but I assume he read it from Lestat’s thoughts when he visited Lestat in NOLA prior to Armand’s separation with Louis, or from another vampire who had seen Lestat passing through NY.
Armand wants Louis to see Lestat for himself bc he wants Louis to “come back to life.”
” `You care about nothing …’ [Armand] was saying. And then he sat up slowly and turned to me so again I could see that dark fire in his eyes. `I thought you would at least care about that. I thought you would feel the old passion, the old anger if you were to see him again. I thought something would quicken and come alive in you if you saw him . . . if you returned to this place.’
^Sorry Armand, fail on that 😛
Whether Louis actually met with Lestat the way he described it in IWTV is up for debate, but Louis might have gotten such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition verbally from Armand. Perhaps, as you say, Louis might have exaggerated the patheticness of the conversation to get a reaction from Lestat, as he was trying to provoke Lestat into coming out of wherever he was hiding.
Or maybe Louis just wanted to tell his story to another soul, like confession, and get some feeling of absolution from the act of telling, maybe it felt good to invent this portion for no good reason. I don’t personally think that’s very IC for Louis but… who knows?
Can we just look at this for a minute….
Two vampires who had been made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking passage to New Orleans.
^This used to really irritate me, these two vampire siblings of Lestat who never appeared again in canon, I have to assume Armand invented them for whatever reason (make Louis jealous that he didn’t help Lestat himself?) or that Daniel’s publisher added them in for whatever reason *shrugs*
Just because I’d like to see if there is a general consensus…
and because @i-want-my-iwtv‘s recent post got me wondering…
How many of your actually feel that Louis’ visiting Lestat at the end of IWTV and the conversation that followed actually happened? Lestat insists that it didn’t, but both him and Louis are unreliable narrators…
Personally, I think it did, however, I think Louis put in some of his own scenes within his telling of the moment to provoke Lestat. That’s why Lestat says it didn’t happen, because it didn’t fully to the extent that Louis said it did.
I actually got the Barnes and Noble edition of the first three novels of the Vampire Chronicles for Christmas, so I’ll eventually be reading back soon to see if my opinion changes or if something suggests otherwise.
Yes, I’d like to know what ppl think about this, too! Pls comment/reblog with whether this happened, or if it happened differently than reported ;D
You know in Interview With The Vampire Louis talks about having ran into Lestat broken in their old home – while in The Vampire Lestat Lestat says it never happened? What’s your thoughts on it? Was Lestat too damaged to remember at the time? Was Louis kicking sand in Lestat’s face to get him to come to him?
Ooooh good question! In IWTV, Louis says that he did visit Lestat (and it was in the movie).
We have #unreliable narrators and it’s hard to say whether it happened, or happened in a different way than described…
They do agree that Lestat was in hiding and pretty decrepit. Louis describes Lestat as being holed up in some crumbling old house some short distance away from their old Rue Royale flat, which Lestat does confirm in TVL:
“And I spent the last years of the 1800s in complete seclusion in the old Garden District a block from the Lafayette Cemetery, in the finest of my houses, slumbering beneath towering oaks.”
I answered it more in depth on this post, in which I said that I trusted Louis’ account. Lestat refusing to kill a baby would be in character for him. That Louis would invent this just whole scene to provoke Lestat out of hiding is less in character for him, but possible. He did leave a lot out, and leaving out information is lying by omission.
Your headcanon may be that it happened, and someone else’s may be that it didn’t. Even if AR says one way or the other, there are readers who will still hold onto their own headcanon. #Your headcanon may vary on this one.
I’ve been reading Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles lately, and I had to draw this one out.
Storyception! Being told a story of that one time Lestat was told a story by Marius of that one time Marius was told a story by that crispy elder guy about Queen Akasha.
I just realized that in TVL Marius calls Armand ‘Armand’ during the Venice flashback and the discontinuity hit me like a brick in the face
(It’s this line, right?) “Rise, Armand, we must leave here. They have come!”
[^I don’t have a pic of Armand from the scene you mentioned, so have Claudia in a library w/ a bunch of studious older dudes who are probably concerned about what an 11 yo is studying for all these hours so late at night]
Armand’s Venice flashback was in Mind-Gift-Vision™ (or whatever you want to call it!), blasting out of Armand at Lestat and Gabrielle like water from a fire hydrant, and Lestat later transcribed it all for us about 200 yrs later. The Mind Gift is not exactly like reading a book; it seems to be more about sharing images, snippets of sound and feeling. Why did Lestat use Armand’s name in that quote and not “Amadeo”? Some ideas:
- Lestat wrote it 200 years after experiencing it, and yes, vampiric memory is supposed to be perfect, but he also went through a few assassination attempts, so it’s possible that a few brain cells were lost along the way.
- If Lestat ‘heard’ an “Amadeo,” in the vision, maybe he thought he must have misheard bc he knew Armand as “Armand,” and transcribed the name he knew.
- Maybe Armand concealed the name Marius gave him, maybe it was too painful for him to share that information with someone who had just wrecking ball’d his coven like Miley Cyrus in a red velvet tank top & undies.
- Maybe Armand had been successfully brainwashed to the point of sealing off that name off from his memory after all those years with the Children of Darkness, to remember it after Lestat left Paris at that time.
- Or it was our usual *~unreliable narrator~* situation, assign the blame to Armand or Lestat 😉
- … Or, LASTLY, and most likely, it was AR who hadn’t come up with the “Amadeo” part yet. *sighs*
I can understand why discrepancies and discontinuities can be jarring, and people do bash the authors of novels for delivering what the readers see as some kind of inferior product :-
IMO, I don’t think an author, artist, or musician is obligated to serve to you a complete and perfect story/picture/song, w/ complete and perfect facts. AR has never said that was her intention. Even the Bible has discrepancies.
Instead of being jarred out of the story, why not make our own headcanons? You can call them “excuses” if you want 😉 Like I just did above. It’s reasonable to assume Armand didn’t want to share that name. It’s reasonable to assume Armand didn’t remember it in that moment, or that Lestat failed to catch that detail, or thought it was incorrect.
Fanworks can criticize but they can also repair what’s confusing, can fill in the interstices of canon (check out this types of fanfic diagram!). You can engage with the material to criticize it, or you can engage with it to repair it, so many ways to engage with canon and, specifically, its discrepancies.
People doing this with fanfic, fanart, and meta-analysis have made the VC so rich! Shared ideas have cured many things that were jarring for me. The missing musician vampire bothered me for so many years, and then, before PL was even a twinkle in AR’s eye, I had at least one strong answer for his disappearance and it gave me a new appreciation for him, for Lestat, for his part in the fabric of the story.
Your headcanon is up to you. You can enhance canon with it. You have that power. Ask other people for their ideas, they can help, too.
Now I’m not saying every discrepancy can be explained, but it is somewhat more manageable in the earlier books. I would love to see people do it with the later books! With the larger things… that are harder to explain.
Hit the jump for more, cut for length.
Some of my favorite art misleads or leaves things out. Here’s, basically, fanart of Jackie O by Al Hirschfeld:
^She has the slightly cartoonish distortion all around, there are strong gesture lines, there are detailed areas (the necklace, the hair, etc.), there’s her face w/
distorted features, and then there are missing lines. The back of her left arm, most of her right arm, but you as the viewer can fill those in yourself. They’re not drawn but they’re there.
It’s not a photograph, it’s an artist’s interpretation of his subject, how she occupies space, maybe how she moves through it, her inner spirit.
Idk, not everyone likes Hirschfeld. I’m sure some people do not consider it to be Art. We all have our own experiences and our own ideas of what Art and Beauty and Good Writing are. Fanworks are a form of engagement with Art.
I-want-my-IWTV 