After Louis and Claudia escape Lestat in their burning home they board a ship for Europe. On the way they muse as to how Lestat had survived Claudia’s poisoning and stabbing. “But how could he have survived? I asked her. You saw him, you know what became of him.” (162) Recounting how Lestat might have survived the night he was dumped into the swamp, Claudia attributes Lestat’s vivacity with his tenacity or a will to live. Louis rejects this conclusion, instead offering, “…perhaps he was incapable of dying…perhaps he is, and we are…truly immortal?” To Louis, the immortality vampirism offers is a very religious thing, and the life that he has gained is a curse.
When confronted with the thought of Lestat being burned to death, Louis thinks that the will to live had nothing to do with Lestat’s survival. He instead feels that to Lestat there was no recourse. There is no choice for a vampire when it comes to death. The sun and earth reject them as agents of Satan. Louis feels that a vampire burned still lives, that the body has been more or less destroyed but that perhaps the vampire remains conscious forever.
When Louis first drinks the blood of another human he does not describe the physical beauty of the runaway slave, nor does he comment on his pressing hunger for blood. When Louis drinks blood for the first time, all else vanishes “and there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart-only this time it beat in perfect rhythm with the drumbeat of my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber of my being” (30). The way Louis describes the heart of his victim I think that the life of a vampire is more closely tied to the heart of its victim then its blood.
For many of the vampires in the book interview with a vampire, life itself means much more then the beating of another’s heart. When Louis first feels and then kills a rat or mouse he senses the creature and it’s life force. Blood itself does not fuel vampires, because blood from the dead is deadly and unpleasant and blood taken out of the body and put in a wine glass soon becomes cold and unpleasant. The life force itself seems to be what vampires feed off of, and blood then is vessel for it.
Lestat kills young rich women and young men at the prime of their life. I couldn’t decide if this destructive tendency of killing people at their pinnacle was another way Lestat choose to get revenge on the world or if all vampires choose to kill the young and beautiful for the pleasure of snuffing out life. The animals that Louis kills are smaller then humans but no vampire makes any attempt to kill horses or cows instead of their regular human kills. I think that this is because the amount of blood has little to do with the amount sustenance drawn from a victim. That is why an animal would never be as pleasing to the palette of a vampire opposed to a human. The life of an animal is a pale comparison to the life of a human.