Interview With The Vampire: Immortality Kinda Sucks (Part 2)

Meanwhile, Lestat struggles with a whole separate aspect of immortality: loneliness. While the story is told through someone else’s perspective, we never learn about what Lestat is like as his own person. The audience only hears about Lestat in his relation to other people. He refuses to talk about what he was like before Louis became his companion, growing incensed at the mere mentioning of the subject. I believe this is a source of one of Lestat’s defining characteristics: Lestat can’t bear the thought of being alone. This is the source of many of his abusive behaviors. We see this in his actions towards Louis, as Lestat’s is at his cruelest whenever Louis threatens to leave him. He’s so desperate for codependency that he turns a child into an immortal vampire, doomed to be trapped in the body of a five-year-old for eternity, as a way to trap Louis. He essentially forces Louis to join in his horrific immortal family. Hell, he is so desperate for Louis’s companionship that he hunts him down across the globe just to get him back.

While loneliness is something Louis definitely deals with as well, there are many points in the novel where he actually is rather content with being on his own. With Lestat, however, it reduces him to a shell of his former self. He lets his surroundings falls apart and refuses to go outside, terrified of the new technology that has come along in the centuries. This change is slowly eating Lestat from the inside out. We, as humans, do deal with loneliness. As we grow up and live our lives, the people we love and hold dear will pass on. It’s the grim truth of life. When we die, the only person that will be with us until that last breath is ourselves. Louis understands this fully well, having lost his brother before. However, arguably, Lestat does not even have himself to rely on. The Lestat that his father described died long ago when he became a vampire, with any humanity Lestat may have had at one point. Lestat cannot physically die; and he has to watch every person he cares about die. The only people that will be with him are people he forcibly makes into vampires. In his own terrible way, Lestat is too seeking some form of stability in the tumultuous life of a vampire. Honestly, just reading about this is enough to keep me from wanting immortality. There’s too much emotional baggage.