Themes

Other themes in the book, such as immortality and loss of innocence, are perhaps more obvious. Immortality is a curse to Louis. Although he has reached the pinnacle of human desire, eternal life, he has done so through the veins of youth. Like Goethe's young Werther he contemplates suicide but nevertheless he clings to his immortal half-life, damned though it be. Selfpreservation is far more powerful force than morality.

Rice also treats the theme of lost innocence. In fact, the entire book is about Louis's coming of age, vampirestyle. Louis learns that he really is inhuman, that he really does enjoy blood, that he really is undead. He loses his human innocence and, eventually, his human guilt as well.

Rice pits mortality against morality on every page of Interview with the Vampire. In later novels of the Vampire chronicles, she uses the metaphor of a savage garden to...