The relationships within Interview with a Vampire

   In the book “Interview with a Vampire” written by Anne Rice, many relationships are made with different aspects of the vampire lore to be explored. Our main character, Louis de Pointe, is a conflicted character who ponders his morals throughout the book. He meets another vampire later in the story named Lestat who he sees as incredibly cruel. Lestat believes in “vampire nature”, brutally killing civilians without any thoughts about it. Louis begins a strong hatred for him throughout the novel and until the end is when Lestat stops killing and begs for Louis to show him another way of living. This is a strong relationship that shows even through hundreds of years a character can still change. He’s a very dark character who tries to change grudges after being incredibly ignorant to change the entire book. Pondering if second chances are truly deserved

  Another big relationship in the novel is Claudia. Louis and Lestat kill her parents and convert her into a vampire at the age of five. She never grows out of her small body but matures greatly throughout the story. She learns the good from Louis and learns the bad from Lestat, becoming her parental figures and gaining a little bit of personality quirks from both of them. After being taken away by Louis to Paris, she meets a doll maker named Madeleine who she becomes close to. She has a longing to Louis to turn her into a vampire and replace him as a guardian. This is her form of growing up, abandoning her only parent Louis to live as independently as she can within her form and moving on.

  The final character is that creates an important relationship is the interviewer himself. Throughout the novel he listens to Louis’s story and doesn’t input much besides questions. But in the end he shocks Louis by asking him to turn him into a vampire. Louis is surprised because even after hearing all the nightmarish horrors he’s been through because of this form, the boy still wants it. It shows the concept of a vampire can be incredibly romantic to some. Living forever, making lasting connections and rarely having enemies. It’s a fantasy we’ve all had at one point. To see someone excited about someone’s misfortune brings him to an outsider’s look and shows how one’s pain could be another’s fortune. These relationships create a multitude of perspectives and without them, this book and vampire myth could never stand the test of time.

The gothic themes of Frankenstein

  Frankenstein, highly regarded as the the first science fiction novel, is no stranger to gothic themes. Most of the novel is centered around Victor Frankenstein, an obsessive scientist whose family dies of diseases. From this dark point, he experiments on the dead on hope to regenerate a dead body. After completing his goal and creating his monster, he abandons him with fear letting him roam the earth.

  The overall theme of death and sadness takes over this story completely. Victor as a character has a very disturbing life that constantly delays his feeling of happiness. A running thread of the novel is the constant delay of his marriage with his cousin Elizabeth. Constant deaths make Victor hopelessly want to work more and this gives him no social life or time to spend on a future wedding.

  The story only gets darker when it goes into the monster’s story. Having met with Victor after searching for years and killing more family members of his, he tells him how his life has been since he abandoned him. He looked onto a family’s life through their window, learning their names, secretly helping with chores and desperately wanting to be apart of it. Only to be rejected at the sight of his face. The monster’s life is a struggle of being unloved, unwanted and not knowing why he was put on earth. It’s incredibly dark and having being turned into the “villain” of the story for wanting answers and acceptance is pretty heartbreaking.

  Both Victor and his monster are tortured souls, constantly butting heads with each other until they reach their demises. It’s a gothic novel by all means. Death, gloom and sadness accompany every page, not holding out for harshness and pushing boundaries for the genre.