11.6.11 EMA - QUEEN TAKEOVER with A SPECIAL GUEST

I had to check this one, I couldn't remember where I've heard it before.

www.mannmuseum.com/lestat-and-promotheus-vampire-as-symbol-of-alienation/


Lestat and Promotheus: Vampire as Symbol of Alienation

Even though Lestat loses faith in God he finds he is "still an immortal being who must find his own reasons to exist" (380). And as the reader follows his quest for meaning, one finds that his existential dilemma is the same for us all, the fact that he's a vampire only exaggerates his alienation and his need to establish his own significance. Lestat tells his friend Nicholas "I can live without God...But I do not think I could go on if I did not believe in the possibility of goodness" (72). Yet this idea of goodness is a personal one since Lestat has decided that good and evil are "merely concepts that man has made" (114). For Lestat, goodness is to love those mortals and other vampires that he becomes attached to and to value their love in return and to only prey on "thieves, killers, and evildoers" (121). Marius, Lestat's vampire teacher, describes him as an "innocent." He tells Lestat, "To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost"; innocence is the "absence of [the] need for illusions," it is a "love and respect for what is right before your eyes" (333). Lestat is thus a paradox; he is an "old-world" evil in a secular world that doesn't believe in him, and in fact he understands the mindset of the new age so well that he himself cannot account for his existence in the old terms of good and evil and is driven to develop his own philosophical theories. Thus, Lestat is representative of many of Rice's other fictional characters in that they "are all made anew by the battering of experience that exposes them to existential realities, frees them from false moralities, and teaches them to trust their own moral philosophies" (Roberts, 141). Lestat finds he must develop his own code, for even though he has dissolved the barrier between life and death, "the world closes tight around this miracle soon enough...you become accustomed to the new limits and the new limits define everything once again" (307). In struggling to develop this code, Lestat arrives at a philosophy based on aesthetic principles that he calls the Savage Garden. Beauty is a supreme Quality, only Beauty is consistent and verified by the natural world, and it is therefore transcendent over moral concepts of good and evil which are based on religious superstition. The Savage Garden is a primal world of predators and prey in which strength, creativity, and developing one's essential nature is emphasized.