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Interview With the Vampire: Louis's torment

Louis is troubled through the book to know if he is truly damned or not. Even before he joins Lestat as a member of the eternal, Louis contemplates suicide but refuses to do so. He is caught between the depression and sadness he feels for his brother and his faith as, at the time, it was believed that suicide would doom one to an eternity in hell. Once he becomes a vampire he initially refuses to kill because he doesn’t know if he is damned or not, and as Lestat consistently doesn’t believe in god or hell, he is no ease to Louis’s torment.  This is even symbolized in Louis’s Indigo plantation. Indigo is a royal color which is known to represent heavenly grace, misery and depression. The thought of never knowing if he is truly damned drastically changes his relationship with humans from being one, to being a vampire but still sympathetic to humanity and refusing to murder, to finally accepting that he has to eat and killing people while maintaining compassion for their life. He eventually reaches the point where the thought torments him so much that he believes “To know, to believe, in one or the other . . . that was perhaps the only salvation for which I could dream.”(Rice 124). He struggles with the concept that he will never know for sure, as both god and the devil exist in faith and not in proof. In a similar sense, his existence as a vampire is specifically what keeps him from ever knowing this truth. He will never die and so he will never know god or the devil. The god that he once believed in and knew was a faith of men, who would live and die. As he journeys across the ocean to Europe he imagines a voice coming up and speaking to him, saying “This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men's treasures are not yours.”(Rice 125). Interpreted to be the voice of god, he is being told that the luxury of belief and the gift or ability to reach Heaven or Hell at the end of one’s life will always elude him. In a sense he is in his own purgatory as he is left alive, unable to ever find his salvation of knowing whether he is truly damned. This purgatory does not start with him becoming a vampire however, it starts with his indecision in committing suicide in the very beginning. Throughout the book, even as a vampire, he could find out what would happen after he dies by stepping into sunlight but cannot do so. Instead he continues to kill humans. No longer feeling bad for them and valuing their life, but rather he envies their ability to die and reach a final end and answer. 

Bridgette Olavage

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