Interview With the Vampire

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”

Louis explains to the boy that it is easier to believe in the devil than in God. In his view, there is always evidence of the devil because evil comes more naturally and easily to people than good. Goodness always requires more effort than evil, therefore it will always be scarcer.

“I never laugh at death, no matter how often and regularly I am the cause of it.”

Lestat mocks Louis for his reverence for life. Lestat kills gleefully, sometimes sadistically, for the joy and vengeance of the act. Despite being a vampire—and a killer—Louis will never grow comfortable will gallows humor. He recognizes all death as a sacrifice, even though he is often a participant in the sacrifice of another.

“How pathetic it is to describe these things which can’t truly be described.”

Louis fails to explain the feelings he experienced when drinking from Lestat’s wrist. There is an irony to his statement. The difficulty Louis has in describing the indescribable is part of what intrigues the boy to the point that he eventually begs Louis to make him a vampire. The sensual life of a vampire exists outside the descriptive powers of language, and language is the primary, inadequate, tool of the interviewer.

“Most of us would much rather see somebody die than by the object of rudeness under our roofs.”

Louis does not admire Lestat, but he appreciates his love for entertaining. Lestat is always a good host because he wants to be noticed, flattered, and desired. He is a brutal killer who still enjoys the social niceties that inflate his ego. Louis sees civility as part of being a decent person, even though he is no longer human.

“When every moment, every moment must be first known and then savored.”

Louis struggles with the reality of his sister’s mortality. He understands that mortals do not have the luxury of being present in every moment because they are often rushing from task to task. Vampires have the luxury of being present and paying attention at a more leisurely pace. Many moments in a vampire’s life may be repeatable in some fashion, but when a human misses a moment, it is lost forever.

“Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.”

Louis admires Babette’s strength, but he also empathizes with it. Her strength puts her on the fringe of society because she lives a life of conviction. Strength requires people to take stands, sometimes at their own peril. As a powerful woman who has run the plantation, Babette holds an isolating position of authority. This is part of why her later accusation of his devilry disturbs him: He values her judgment and knows her to be a person of substance.

“I don’t know whether I come from the devil or not. I don’t know what I am…I am to live to the end of the world, and I do not even know what I am!”

Louis is frustrated that Babette assumes he must be a creation of the devil. She has more conviction about his identity than he does. When Louis contemplates living forever but never finding answers about himself or his origins, it causes him greater existential turmoil than he experienced during his mortal life. Hearing it from Babette cuts him deeply since she is a person he has helped and enriched.

“Though Lestat had never said anything about devils or hell to me, I believed I was damned when I went over to him, just as Judas must have believed it when he put the noose around his neck.”

For most of his life as a vampire, Louis lives as if he is already damned. The notion that he may never have to pay for his killings would mean admitting that God might not exist or might not sit in judgment of humans or vampires. Judas had a luxury that Louis did not: Judas knew that he had betrayed Jesus and was therefore damned. Louis believes he is probably damned, but he does not have the same level of proof.

“God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately and so shall we. He takes the richest and the poorest and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are none so like Him as ourselves.”

Lestat tries to comfort Louis in his torment over killing. Lestat views vampires as noble, Godlike creatures who are equally as free as God. He believes that picking and choosing victims according to arbitrary criteria would be an insult to the elevated status of a vampire. He wants Louis to share his perspective, if only to avoid future conversations that Lestat finds tedious.

“Evil is a point of view…We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate, and mortal men cannot know without regret.”

Lestat does not believe evil is an objective truth, available for consensus among philosophers or theologists. He wishes for Louis to exist in a state beyond conscience or ethics, a state in which something becomes an objective good simply because it brings him pleasure or satisfaction. Lestat wants Louis to be as entitled to indulge in his desires as Lestat, free from guilt or second guessing.

“Let the flesh instruct the mind”

Claudia’s mantra to Louis suggests that they can only learn the deepest truths about themselves when they indulge in what comes naturally to them as vampires: killing. Claudia is interested in learning, but unlike Louis, she prefers to have experience as her teacher rather than books. Vampires learn through violence and the indulgence of their appetites. Violence and satiation are as much Claudia’s teachers as any book could be.

“Hell is hatred, people living together in eternal hatred.”

Claudia pretends to make peace with Lestat before attempting to kill him. Her quote echoes the famous line in Sartre’s play No Exit, in which a character says that “Hell is other people.” The line in Sartre’s play is spoken by someone who is trapped in hell for all eternity. Vampires are also eternal, and eternal solitude is even less appealing than eternity with someone hated.

“Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing...but Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questing preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise.”

Paris provides Louis with something of a respite from his troubles. Because Paris is overwhelming and rewarding, it distracts him. This is even before he knows that Armand and the other vampires are there. Louis forgets himself entirely, which is the greatest peace he knows. It is in Paris that he speaks of his existence with the greatest contentment. He can still feel, and he is not yet emotionally detached from mortality.

“Consequently, if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan’s power comes from God and so that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s children also. There are no children of Satan, really.”

Armand frustrates Louis because he does not have any profound answers about their origins or destinies, despite having lived for centuries. Armand refuses to believe that vampires are evil or that Satan could be a malevolent, independent force who acts outside of God’s will. Vampires are as much God’s creation as the devil is. Armand is also the only character who systematically attacks Louis’s ideas with rhetorical questioning, something that Lestat was incapable of.

“Aren’t there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?”

Armand points out the flaws in Louis’s views on morality. He insists that if there is a continuum of good acts, then there must also be gradations of evil. Performing a good act does not automatically render one good any more than one evil act makes a person evil. The nature of evil is not binary for Armand. He resists Louis’s simplistic ethical interpretations, which gives Louis a measure of relief.

“And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have.”

Louis gives Armand his perspective on human life in the absence of God’s existence. He insists that mortals have no more precious resource than time, and to end a finite life prematurely is a legitimate evil. It robs the deceased of all potential future experiences and joys as well as anyone the person could have helped or loved.

“The only power that exists is inside ourselves.”

Armand refutes Louis’s notion that higher powers are necessary for a conception of good and evil. He views all religions, superstitions, and moral decrees as lies created by people who sought power. He does not understand Louis’s insistence on debating whether they are from the devil when it is unsure that the devil exists.

“Killing other vampires is very exciting; that is why it is forbidden under penalty of death.”

Armand’s remark describes one of the vampire’s main challenges: boredom. The vampires in his court say that boredom is their cardinal sin. This makes sense in the context of eternity: Any novelty would eventually become alluring. Killing another vampire out of boredom would probably lead to more killing.

“I love you still, that’s the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!”

Claudia’s relationship with Louis is far more complicated than her relationship with Lestat. She wishes that she could hate Louis, who condemned her to eternal life in the body of a child. If she had never hated Lestat so bitterly, she could not properly gauge the intensity of her love for Louis.

“Fire merely destroys.”

As they watch the burning doll shop, Louis crystallizes the symbolism of fire throughout the novel. Claudia sees fire as a purifying agent, but Louis knows that it is only a weapon that leads to destruction. Most of the greatest transitions and calamities of his life have started with the weaponization of flames. This foreshadows his use of fire to destroy the Theatres des Vampires and everyone inside.

“Don’t you see? I’m not the spirit of any age. I’m at odds with everything and always have been! I have never belonged anywhere with anyone at any time!”

Louis does not understand why anyone refers to him as the spirit of an age. He does not feel as if he has a place or a time. He was unhappy as a mortal, and he is even more tormented as a vampire. Yet, Lestat and Armand both insist on symbolizing him. He resists the idea that he is a link between their older worlds and the modern age that is coming. Louis is a relatively young vampire, but he already feels a tiresome gulf between himself and the current times.

“That passivity in me has been the core of it all, the real evil.”

Louis laments Claudia’s death and blames himself for it. Specifically, he despises the weakness that kept him from acting. He destroys Armand’s vampires out of revenge, but if had he been able to tap into that aggression and assertiveness earlier, Claudia would be alive, and Louis never would have become beholden to Lestat. At this point, the ultimate evil for Louis is his inability to act when necessary.

“That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.”

Louis tells Armand that the fact that they can love each other is proof of their evil natures. They can love something, or someone, that any righteous person would wish to destroy. For Louis, accepting Armand’s companionship and love is tantamount to embracing evil and ceasing to strive for good.