66 pages • 2 hours read
The Vampire Lestat
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Lelio Rising”
Prologue Summary: “Downtown Saturday Night in the Twentieth Century”
The novel begins in New Orleans in 1984. Lestat introduces himself to the reader as a vampire whose human life ended in the 1780s. He is also a rock star and the author of an autobiography. Lestat went underground in 1929 and was awakened by the sounds of radio waves, and specifically a band called Satan’s Night Out.
The band practices a block away from where Lestat sleeps under his house, near the Lafayette Cemetery. He rises up to feed on animals at first, then kills human murderers, never anyone innocent. He hires a lawyer who helps him move his fortune around and obtain identification. Lestat learns about the changes that have happened while he slumbered, and is amazed at the wealth of the mid-1980s.
Lestat spends some time reading books, talking to people, and watching films. He then introduces himself as the vampire Lestat to the members of Satan’s Night Out—Alex, Larry, and Tough Cookie—and tells them he wants to join the band. After Lestat plays some supernatural music for them, the band members are thrilled he wants to join. They recognize his name from the book Interview With the Vampire, and think he is imitating one of the characters from it.
Lestat buys a copy of the book and discovers that Louis gave away many vampire secrets and told some lies about Lestat. He avoids the band for a week, riding around on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, listening to music, and reading more books. At the end of the week, he makes arrangements with his lawyer for the band to record their music, make music videos, and go on tour. He returns to Satan’s Night Out, which is now renamed The Vampire Lestat, bringing the paperwork the lawyer drew up and champagne.
Lestat thinks about Louis’s interview and how his book will be different. Lestat contemplates how his music and book might start a war among the vampires, but he longs for it to unite them. He sits down at a computer to begin writing his book.
“The Early Education and Adventures of the Vampire Lestat”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
When Lestat is a 21-year-old human, he lives on his “father’s land in the Auvergne in France” (23). Lestat has three older brothers, with the eldest named Augustin. Their father is the Marquis de Lioncourt.
While his family owns the land and their title, they are cash poor, and Lestat hunts for food for them to eat. One morning in January, Lestat goes out hunting a pack of wolves at the request of the people in his village. There are eight wolves, which is more than the villagers believed there were. In the bloody battle, Lestat loses his two dogs and horse. After having to put down his injured horse to end its suffering, Lestat feels broken. Augustin doesn’t believe Lestat killed eight wolves, and Lestat shuts himself up in his room in the castle.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
After about a week, he brings two dogs up from the kennel and his mother, Gabrielle, visits him. When Lestat was 12, she had paid for him to attend school in a monastery. Lestat loved the place and decided he “wanted to enter the order” (31). This declaration upset his aristocratic family, and his brothers took him home. His mother consoled him by giving him dogs, a horse, and a musket; Lestat learned to hunt. When Lestat was 16, he saw a commedia dell-arte performance and ran away with the acting troupe, playing the part of Lelio, a lover. Audiences loved him, and the actress playing his character’s beloved Isabella had sex with him. His family once more forced him to come home. Gabrielle consoled him with a new weapon and horse. She is the only family member he has ever felt connected to, as he is otherwise an outcast.
When Lestat is 21, Gabrielle tells him that she understands how he is feeling. None of the men in the family understood the pain she went through in childbirth, and none of the men understand what Lestat went through hunting the wolves. Lestat tells her his secret fantasy of killing the men in the family, and Gabrielle tells him her fantasy of running away and sleeping with all the men that want to have her in an inn. They break out into fits of laughter. After sitting together in silence for a while, she admits that she is sick, will probably die by the end of the year, and is horrified by this.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
When villagers come to honor Lestat for killing the wolves, he agrees to it only to please his mother. Among the rich merchants is Nicolas de Lenfent, the draper’s son, and Lestat is amazed by him. Nicolas presents Lestat with “a great red velvet cloak lined in fur” (42) of the wolves, with matching boots. Augustin says the gifts will make Lestat “impossible”; Nicolas whispers that he is also impossible and invites Lestat to tell him about the battle with the wolves someday.
Lestat asks Gabrielle about Nicolas, and learns Nicolas has upset his family by becoming a violinist. She encourages Lestat to become friends with Nicolas.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
About a week later, Lestat meets Nicolas in the inn. They get a private room and talk about Nicolas’s time in Paris, studying with Mozart, and the theaters he visited. Nicolas reminds Lestat of a time when they were children and he cried in the “witch’s place” (47). Lestat is embarrassed. Nicolas calls him “wolfkiller” and they get very drunk.
Lestat demands that Nicolas play his violin, and the music causes Lestat to cry, as well as kiss and hug Nicolas. Nicolas carries Lestat home. The following day, Lestat comes to Nicolas’s house and asks to continue their conversation.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
For weeks, Lestat and Nicolas drink and talk together. They repeatedly reach a state of drunkenness that they call the “Golden Moment” (51) when everything seems to make sense temporarily. They discuss goodness and art.
One night, Nicolas suggests they go to the witch’s place to play music and dance. Nicolas plays his violin and Lestat cries. Nicolas says they will leave the village someday and gets Lestat to dance with him. A few nights later, they experience the “Dark Moment” (55). After talking about moving to Paris, Lestat tells Nicolas that his mother is dying, then becomes upset at the idea that the meaning of life may not be revealed to humans at the time of their death. Lestat is overwhelmed with an existential crisis about meaninglessness and nothingness until he can only repeat the sound “oh.”
Lestat remains highly agitated for several days, questioning the men in his family about death and God. However, he does not question his mother. Lestat also questions the priest and leaves unsatisfied. Nicolas plays his violin in the orchard to calm Lestat. This causes Lestat to cry in the church. He reflects on how he still, in the 1980s, sometimes feels the same way.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Lestat’s existential crisis slowly fades. His mother visits him on the first night of Lent and comforts him. He shares his feelings with her, and she is amused that he rages against the human condition itself.
Gabrielle gives Lestat some money and tells him that she wants him to live in Paris before she dies. They kiss and hug. She shares that Lestat has been able to do things that she couldn’t do as a woman in the late 1700s and encourages him to leave right away. He runs to meet Nicolas at the Lent bonfire, telling him about the money for their move.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
They move to Paris within a fortnight. Lestat finds a letter-writer who knows Italian, and he sends his mother a letter that his father and siblings can’t read about his arrival in Paris.
Lestat and Nicolas get jobs at a “shabby little boulevard theater” (64). Lestat loves being in the theater, even though his job involves cleaning, security, and assisting the actors, but not acting. Nicolas isn’t as happy as Lestat, but his violin playing is well-received.
One night, Lestat goes on as Lelio, his old role. He has no stage fright; rather, he gets an immense amount of pleasure from being watched by the audience. The audience loves him, and Renaud—the theater manager—says Lestat can continue to play Lelio. An actress demands Lestat get paid. Lestat and Nicolas celebrate, and Lestat has a letter written to Gabrielle describing his big break.
That fall, in September, Lestat is on the handbills and the theater is doing a new play, rather than “the old commedia” (68). He receives a rave review in the papers and sends a clipping to Gabrielle. The weather turns cold and Lestat is grateful for his cloak lined in wolf fur. Overall, he is happier than he has ever been.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
In October, Lestat starts to notice someone mysteriously stalking him. Nicolas and Lestat debate good and evil in art. After his performance one night, Lestat tells Nicolas that the stalker wears a hooded cloak, has a face like a mask, and knows about the wolves. Nicolas thinks this is ridiculous, but Lestat thinks he hears someone whisper “Wolfkiller” (74). Nicolas says to forget it and go to bed.
Prologue-Part 1 Analysis
In this section of the novel, Anne Rice uses one first-person point of view. Lestat speaks directly to the reader, using I/me pronouns, which creates a sense of intimacy and allows Rice to delve into his thoughts and feelings. The frame narrative, appearing in the prologue and the second epilogue, is set in 1984, a time of economic prosperity in the United States. However, Part 1 is set in the “eighteenth century” (24) when Lestat de Lioncourt is a 21-year-old human. Rice gives an idea of his life before he became a vampire in this part. She also introduces two other main characters—Lestat’s mother, Gabrielle, and his close companion, Nicolas—in Part 1.
In the Prologue and Part 1, Rice introduces the theme of The Performance of Vampirism and Humanity. When Lestat is alive, he wants to be an actor and runs away with “the commedia dell’arte” (33). He enjoys playing the part of Lelio and is successful in his short run of performances before his aristocratic family forces him to come home. Lestat believes that “Actors and actresses make magic” (51) and wants to be adored by live audiences, which speaks to the way he wishes to forge an artistic identity for himself instead of conforming to his family’s aristocratic traditions.
The second time he leaves home, Lestat becomes a part of Renaud’s theater in Paris. The night that they finally allow him to perform on stage (rather than work behind the scenes or front of house) is the night that Magnus decides to turn him into a vampire. Magic becomes performing the acts of vampirism, rather than performing on stage. For humans, the magic of performing is the ability to affect people and be famous; vampires are supposed to hide and keep their magic secret. Lestat’s defiance of the rule of secrecy is discussed in the prologue, foreshadowing how he will eventually betray the secrets of the vampires to the human public once he returns to performing.
Rice uses Lestat’s 1980s rock music to introduce the theme of The Importance of the Arts. Music has a profound emotional impact on Lestat when he is alive, as well as when he is a vampire. After he goes underground as a vampire in the 1920s, Lestat is reawakened by Satan’s Night Out. There is “something vampiric about rock music” (6), he thinks. The music of the 1980s resurrects a once-lost passion in Lestat, as music is the reason he rejoins the world after being brutally burned by Louis. As the flashbacks reveal, Lestat’s love of music began when he was human, forming important connections between his past life and his vampiric existence. When Nicolas plays violin for Lestat, he thinks: “I had never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings” (49-50). Nicolas’s music is able to console Lestat when he has an existential crisis while they are alive. In these moments, art offers emotional or psychological comfort. Later, when Lestat is a vampire, music helps him remain in touch with his more human emotions.
Lestat’s existential crisis is one of the many times Rice explores The Tensions Between Good and Evil, a key theme in the text. Lestat experiences a “Dark Moment” (55), or fear of nothingness after death, when he discovers his mother is dying. Lestat feels spiritually lost, because he was born during the age of Enlightenment, when Christianity was becoming less powerful and philosophers were advancing the idea of science and human reason as keys to human progress. His family rejected his desire to join an order of monks, and overall were not religious. By contrast, Nicolas was raised in a very religious household, although his feelings toward faith are more ambivalent. The two men’s differing beliefs can be seen in their differing opinions about music. Lestat says, “Actors and musicians—they’re saints to me” (51), with Lestat’s use of the term “saints” imbuing his idea of the artist’s work with the sense of something sacred, implying that creating art is a good and moral act. However, Nicolas says his music doesn’t contain any good intentions, arguing, “I’m evil and I revel in it” (72). Nicolas does not believe he can be good, while Lestat always strives for goodness.
Rice introduces the motif of beauty in this section. Lestat becomes concerned when Gabrielle’s “beauty, which was always very important to [him], seemed vulnerable for the first time” (36) during her illness. Beauty reflects youth and health, with Gabrielle’s declining beauty speaking of her impending death. Rice also introduces the symbolism of angels, frequently describing characters, both human and vampire, as angels to invoke a sense of goodness and otherworldly beauty. In this section, Lestat is described as a “yellow-haired angel fallen out of a marquis’s family onto the stage” (68). In becoming an actor in Paris, Lestat is like a “fallen angel” because he has rebelled against paternal authority and expectation, in an image reminiscent of the fall of Lucifer and the other angels in the Biblical myth about Lucifer’s rebellion against God. Throughout the text, the vampires will be presented as angels who nevertheless engage in the evil act of killing for blood, which will deepen the parallels between the vampires and the idea of “fallen angels” and further illuminate the text’s thematic preoccupation with good versus evil.
Unlock all 66 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
