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Right now, I am a little bit backlogged,in terms of things to get done. I already had this discussion post planned as a way of sharing some relevant thoughts from a thesis I published about a year ago now, when in the process of graduating college with an English Degree.

I hope you don’t mind me sharing two paragraphs that I feel are very pertinent to this week’s discussion post! I’ll be posting more specific questions on our Coven’s Facebook page!

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As always, all visitors to this blog are more than welcome to leave their own thoughts and impressions on this week’s discussion questions. I hope you don’t mind me sharing two paragraphs from it that I believe offer some trenchant thoughts on this week’s questions:

Again, these two quotes are not to be shared or republished. If you are interested in seeking out a full-text version of my thesis, it can be found on Amazon.com as a legal Kindle edition that is very reasonably priced.

Week # 6 Discussion Question:

1.Basically, what are your thoughts about the entire sequence that takes place in the church, between Louis and the priest. What is the philosophical and religious implications for Louis?  How does this scene compare  and contrast with a similar confession scene in The Wolf Gift?

Thoughts, from my published thesis, about scene from Interview with the Vampire:

Being an evolved monster figure, Louis feels a deep sense of psychological incompleteness
without either the human contexts of his former life and Lestat’s mocking presence. Visiting a Catholic church before heading off to Europe in search of other vampires, Louis pathetically tries to recapture the religious faith that typified his human existence that might tell him that his recent sins have not completely transformed him into a monster. Susannah Clements adds that “the irony of the situation is made clear when he ends the confession by attacking the priest from whom he was seeking absolution-thus confirming his nature (at least to himself)” (Clements 38). Correctly, Susannah notes the irony of the scene, since vampires traditionally are not even able to walk on hallowed grounds. This scene is often dismissed by many critics, though it serves as a mirror image of a later scene, where Louis confesses his existential dread later to a venerable vampire, named Armand, who has the same adulation for Louis’ moral sensitivity as Lestat. By agonizingly asking the priest “Why does he suffer me to live?”(Interview with the Vampire 147), Louis is looking for absolution from the Catholic rules that governed his human life up till the death of his brother. Of course, the priest laughs because the very notion of a vampire or an anthropomorphic idea of Satan walking around is absurd; the priest uncannily mirrors Louis’ own lack of faith in the veracity of his brother’s religious visions. Bitterly realizing that the religious superstitious beliefs no longer are applicable to his life as a vampire, Louis grabs the priest “on the very steps of the communion rail and pulled him down to face me there and sank my teeth into his neck”(Interview with the Vampire 174). Mirroring the image of the brick stairs that his brother fell from and the same image of stairs upon which Lestat made him into a vampire, Louis sharply rejects and represses the moral paradigm that once held him in thrall”
(Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and the Psychological Evolution of the Vampire- Justin Boyer)

Thoughts from my published thesis about the same type of sequence, from Anne Rice’s The Wolf Gift

” While Reuben Golding’s moral senses are much more judicious than Anne Rice’s vampire characters, the moral questions that the character wrestles with are still complex. More than any other novel, Anne Rice uses this novel to sharply question whether or not the vigilante ethics that Reuben depends upon are considered moral, based on our modern societal ethics. To a greater extent, Anne Rice questions whether or not a man-wolf with a highly paradoxical psyche really has the divine capacity to truly discern and evaluate our morally complex issues. Due to the remarkable similarities that the character of Batman and Reuben share, another Batman critic, Isaac Cates, surmises that “since Batman operates at the level of street crime in a more human scale of action, his ethics or his methods are often described in shades of grey”(Cates 834). In the same vein as Batman, Anne Rice’s Reuben Golding has a stranger paradox, for he operates with his less than grey moral senses with behavior that may seemingly be deemed morally proper by certain classical virtues explored in many superhero graphic novels. In a scene that parallels Louis’ confessional scene in Interview with the Vampire, Reuben’s brother, a priest named Jim, refutes Reuben’s moral concerns that his vigilante ethics might be morally incorrupt: ““Besides-you’re rescuing innocent victims, since when does the devil care about innocent victims” (The Wolf Gift 194). With this new psyche, Reuben struggles with whether or not murdering evildoers can even be posited as ethical behavior. Unlike Lestat, Reuben does not simply accept that ““There has been a change in the way I view the world, a change in the moral temperature of things” (The Wolf Gift 194). As a highly developed hero figure, Reuben neither lets his Catholic morality taint his perception of himself or allow a sense of moral relativity to simply justify his morally questionable behavior. Instead, Reuben Golding must evolve a moral solution beyond the reach of both Lestat and Louis to find peace between his primeval Id and his morally reasoned superego.”
(Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and the Psychological Evolution of the Vampire-Justin Boyer)

 

The second question will always remain unchanged for the remainder of our discussions either on the comment section below or on the Coven Facebook Group page!!

Unchanged, Immortalized Discussion Question:

2.Do you have any other interesting observations on any other particular scenes in the story?

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William Massa’s Fear the Light: Who Murdered Dracula?
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