The Sword and Laser discussion

This is one of the books I have clear memories reading as a child. Even without the contrast provided in The Vampire Lestat, I felt as the story proceeded some of the ways Louis was not a reliable narrator of his own life. I felt some of my own struggle trying to make sense of my life and the experiences I had been given. Louis asks some of the same questions with which I struggled. And I also saw elements of adults around me in Louis' erratic and shifting self-perception.

And it's not that Louis was trying to deceive or manipulate. His story isn't unreliable in the ways some narrators attempt to twist things to gain power or something else they desire. (We've likely all encountered that sort of person.) He's doing the interview in the book in an attempt to bring some structure, order, sense, or meaning from his story. Louis is an unreliable narrator of his own life and experience in much the same way we all are. Or at least how I imagine most of us must be based on my own life and experiences. Just existing as a human being can be hard and confusing. We look for meaning, for a way to make sense of things, when often there is no deeper reason. Sh*t happens.

We are also always the protagonist in our own story though we may be little more than a bit player in another person's story. And it's hard to be truly be fully and truly honest -- neither more nor less -- with ourselves about either the harm or the good we've done. And that gets even more confusing when so often we aren't really even acting or choosing, just struggling to keep our heads above the flood as we're swept along in everything happening around us.

Anne Rice portrayed that well in her writing and not just in her Vampire Chronicles. I remember some of those same elements in, for instance, Servant of the Bones.

I think that's probably part of the reason I'm often drawn to books featuring a main character that can charitably be described as a hot mess, which Louis certainly is.

Reading it again, I couldn't help but reflect on Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, which I loved so much I both read in print and then listened to the audio. Sabine is the vampire in that tale with Lestat energy, though drawing more from the Lestat in The Vampire Lestat. And I found Sabine fascinating and captivating. My heart was grabbed and in places broken for Alice, who tastes like grief. But the more I reflect, the character in that book with whom I most closely identified was probably Lottie. Sigh.

Any reactions on unreliable narrators in general or Louis specifically?

I don't know how intentional this was on the part of Anne Rice, but I do enjoy the way this book is in conversation with that foundational classic of vampire literature, Dracula by Bram Stoker. In that book, told through letters, telegrams and diary entries, we get the perspective of the vampire victims and the hunters. Now, we get the perspective of the vampire himself, and his attempts to justify his long, parasitic life.

It's then very interesting when Rice flips perspective in the belated sequel, and we see things from Lestat's point of view.

I do enjoy an unreliable narrator and a story told from different perspectives. The recent TV adaptation does some interesting stuff with this, with the idea of the central interview being done and then re-done years later with new information.

As an aside, I had completely forgotten that Daniel Molloy is unnamed in Interview. He's simply "the boy" throughout the novel. Louis needs an audience for his words with all the thoughts and emotions filling them, but that audience is for all intents and purposes incidental.

And I loved the scenes in the TV show where Daniel confronts Louis again and again with the inconsistencies and often completely different versions of his story leading to that climactic confrontation at the end of Season 1. And that's so true. The ways we tell our stories change and change again over time. Sometimes it's because we grow more honest with ourselves and move closer to the truth. But I think that's less common than we like to tell ourselves. I think we're more likely to simply change the way we lie to ourselves when the old stories become threadbare and untenable.

That's the sense in which I meant we are all unreliable narrators of our own stories. Sometimes it's simply from lack of information. We build a story that's deeply flawed because we lacked key pieces of knowledge. Sometimes it's because of influence and manipulation from others, conscious or unconscious, shaping our perception through their vision of us. Sometimes it's because our story is the only version of the "truth" we can face in the present moment. All those and more are constantly at work in us.

We are pattern makers who form stories from experiences with incomplete information and partial knowledge at best. And that's true even of our own internal experience in certain situations. What I actually experienced inside myself, the flood of emotions and thoughts and whatever I catch happening around me, will always be different from what I remember experiencing in that moment. And that memory of the experience will also likely be different each time I remember it.