Interview With a Vampire Response: The Bore of Immortality

What I found fascinating about Interview With the Vampire was the way Anne Rice examines the nature of death and what effect immortality has on her character's actions and personalities. After reading the book, I looked into the background of it's creation and learned that Anne Rice wrote it in the wake of her young daughter's death. After learning this, the desperate discussions and debates the characters have concerning the nature of life and dying make a lot of sense. While reading, you keep bumping against the kind of deep confusion and despair that accompanies a tragic loss, especially one as painful as a young death. By telling a story about characters who are essentially immoral, we see the Rice try to reconcile with the idea that death has a purpose.

Our main character, Louis is tortured by never-ending life, searching desperately for another vampire who has an answer for his purpose and reason for existence. When he find the Parisian vampires he is disappointed to learn that just like how the short lives of humans are not given a clear meaning or proof of a higher power, the same goes for the immortal life vampires. With there being no answer, Louis has to try to figure this out for himself. Like many people, Louis is able to find a purpose for living by taking care of his adopted daughter, Claudia. However she is no ordinary child. Claudia is vampire, forever frozen at the physical age of five, never to really grow up in the way one should. Claudia's condition is an obvious metaphor for the way the death of a child forever traps them in that age in the memories of they're loved one. Despite those who knew the child continuing to live, grow, and move into new phases of their lives, the memory of their loved one stays the same. One of the hardest things to deal with after a loss like that is accepting that that person will never have new experiences while you will. It's cosmically cruel and impossible to find a reason why this is. Claudia's existence plays around with the idea of life having some purpose for ending. By never physically aging while aging mentally, Claudia is tortured by the half-life she is forced to live. Louis tries to do what he can for his daughter, but even his love for her is not enough to make her happy. After she is killed by the other vampires, Louis spirals into a grief that he never really comes out of. He travels the world with Armando to see all different art, but he finds that he no longer desires to understand human nature the way he once did and finds the art to be meaningless. He can't find interest in Armando either, despite the other man doing what he can to make him happy.

He can't find the anchor that would tie him into his life. As Armando states earlier, most vampires don't have the willpower for immortality as they eventually lose touch with those things that they held dear from their time and anchored them to the world. Louis continues to live on but he no longer finds pleasure in life, instead feeling nothing but profound numbness. Through the exploration of these characters, Anne Rice argues that life can really only have meaning if it ends. Both Claudia and Louis are shells of the people they once were or could have been. Every story must have it's end, even if some are tragically shorter than others. It's doesn't mean that that life any less meaningful.