For humans, as Dr. Maggie Kilgour writes in From Communion to Cannibalism, the self can be constructed through sexuality, eating, drinking and another oral activity that is similar to eating; verbal communication. (Kilgour 8)

For the vampire, however, food and sex become one in the drinking of the victim's blood. As such, consuming the blood of his or her victim perfects incorporation and rejects the temporality of sexual union. When Rice's vampires couple with a victim, the result is a consummation that becomes a consumption. Of course, a vampire with a conscience must ask why he must consume another life to sustain himself. He must ask if his existence warrants the loss of another's life. Certainly the narrator of Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire, Louis, has asked this of himself. Moreover, he has defined himself through consummation/consumption, and now turns to the final stage of self-definition; the verbal definition, the justification of his existence to another in a confessional interview.

Rice plays with associations between eating and sex. For Rice's vampires, feeding becomes a metaphor for sexual union, a type of oral sex. Kilgour notes, "Like eating, intercourse makes two bodies one, though in a union that is fortunately less absolute and permanent." (Kilgour 7)

In his film version of the novel, Neil Jordan visually highlights sexual eroticism. Two male vampires, Lestat and Louis, seduce and devour an unsuspecting tavern girl while watching the carnivalesque scene that plays before them. (Interview 17:08-18:52). This scene demonstrates how the protagonist consumes the blood of his victim, incorporating it into himself, as one might snack on potato chips while watching television. Arguably, the clip lacks authority because it differs from the novel. However, it works on a visual level, linking kissing to consumption.

As sensual intensity increases, the viewer observes the blur between the desire for consummation and the hunger for consumption. Hence, the point of communion (where the victim and the victor both receive pleasure from the encounter) now becomes cannibalism. In this scene Rice's character enacts Kilgour's assertion that when the struggle is "between communion and cannibalism, cannibalism has usually won." (Kilgour 7).

If the metaphor of blood drinking as sexual union holds true, then this is a coming of age, a deflowering of the "virgin" vampire's identity. Lestat becomes Louis' experienced lover leading him in the act. As Louis innocence is shed, he cries, "I will not take her life" but it is too late. From this point Louis questions his actions, his needs, his desires, and attempts to come to grips with his new identity: a vampiric self struggling to displace the old human self with all of its pre-established morals.

Kilgour in From Communion to Cannabalism asserts that "as you are what you eat,' eating is a means of asserting and controlling individual and cultural identity." (Kilgour 6) As such, the narrator attempts to control his individual identity by controlling what he eats. From the Bible to Rabelais the idea of transforming blood into wine is present. Lestat mocks the transubstantiation ritual:

"Rats can be quite nice", he said. And he took the rat to the wine glass, slashed its throat, and filled the glass rapidly with blood . . . And then he sipped the blood as delicately as if it were burgundy. He made a slight face.
"It gets cold so fast".
"Do you mean that we can live from animals?" I asked
(Rice 29)

After the epiphany, that he may survive on something more morally acceptable to his past self, Louis becomes the selective eater/lover that St. Augustine defines in Confessions: "I struggle daily against greed for food and drink. This is not an evil which I can decide once and for all to repudiate and never to embrace again, as I was able to do with fornication." (Kilgour 49) This works rather well for a medieval saint, but what happens to the modern vampire, a creature whose food and drink is also his fornication. Blood is not an evil Louis can repudiate without death, for as Louis mentions, "Blood, I was to find, was a necessity itself." (Interview 17:08).

Rice's character defines his self through metaphorical acts of a heterosexual, homosexual, masturbatory and paedophiliac nature. The vampire turns to all of the aforementioned identification tactics in an effort to come to terms with the self within a never ending existence. After all, an eternal self must incorporate all sexual experiences and preferences if it is to be complete in an unending world.

In the beginning, Louis adopts an Augustinian approach to calming his hunger by drinking the blood of rats, pigeons and other vermin. However, the blood of vermin cannot satisfy Louis' vampiric hunger. On the level of bodily nourishment it is similar to a failed attempt at vegetarianism. On the sexual level, Louis' attempt to avoid consuming human blood is similar to masturbation, desire calmed but never satiated.

Failing to find identity as a frugal gourmet, Louis takes Claudia, a very young girl, and feeds from her. Devastated and repulsed with his weakness, he flees. After Lestat makes Claudia a vampire, Louis attempts to define the self by having a relationship with one of his own kind. But the effectiveness of this relationship proves to be less than satisfying. He then has a homo-erotic encounter with Armand, the Parisian vampire leader, where they share a young servant boy in a slow, teasing drain.

At the end of the novel, Louis loses his past identity, becoming nothing more than the food he incorporates. He no longer defines the self on human terms, but rather on a preternatural level. His surrender comes to a climax after achieving a metaphorically heterosexual union with Madeleine, a woman who Louis transforms into a vampire to be a companion for Claudia. Louis tells Claudia that "What died tonight in this room is the last vestige in me of what was human." (Rice 245) The vampire self has assumed the host human body and now begins to define itself. Louis' metaphorical sexual experimentation has ended and he must acknowledge that he is as he began: a vampire who kills to survive. He does this by returning to visit his maker/first sharer, Lestat.

The narrator articulates Louis' struggle in the interview. The first difficulty is to let go of his human pain. He must then begin the transition from human to vampiric self. Finally, Louis must define that vampiric self. In an act of communion with Madeleine, Louis makes the final break.

How does the individual create an image of the self, knowing that his existence depends upon the slaughter and incorporation of others? Rice gives the reader three possible models to connect morality with the unchangeable needs of the body. Lestat resigns himself to becoming a ruthless hunter, searching for nothing but the finest prey to take into his body, to quicken his dead heart. Armand represents the Nietzschean apostle who attempts to define the morality of self against the teachings of a god who, he eventually decides, does not exist. Louis, a Thomas Hardy- type character, wrestles with the preternatural aspects of his existence. Only after failing to find a companion against which he can define himself does he turn to the confessional. He defines the self through verbal communication; the interview.

Kilgour discusses "how attitudes towards incorporation change depending on our relations to our own bodies and self-definitions." (Kilgour 7) Louis' attitude towards incorporation begins to change changes as he progresses from a human to a vampiric self. No longer is he disgusted with drinking human blood, for after two hundred years as a vampire, he is no longer killing "his own kind."

Before displacement of the human self Louis was disgusted with his need to incorporate what he believed to be those of his own image. Louis mistakenly believed that he was breaking the undeniable law that you do not "kill your own kind" let alone eat them. (Rice 222) However, as his relation to his bodily hungers and new definition of self changes, so does his attitude towards them. Louis' final resort to verbal definition is not surprising because, as Kilgour indicates, "Another oral activity that is similar to eating but offers a less physical model for exchange is verbal communication, rooted in the body and yet detached from it . . Food is the matter that goes in the mouth, words the more refined substance that afterward comes out" (Kilgour 8) The interview represents the "more refined substance" that can be accessed only after much of the world is incorporated into Louis.

Louis tell his child companion that "We need our language, our people. I want to go directly now to Paris." (Rice 180) Louis thereby begins to flirt with the identification of the self with familiar language. He feels a need, albeit it human, to hear words known to his ears. He attempts to use words to express his angst, to bring his struggle into accessible terms. This identification with a language and a people perhaps serves as a prelude to the interview he later wishes to conduct. By instigating an interview with a journalist, Louis not only commences a confession of his sins, but also contemplates his eternal vampiric self through the "vampire eyes" of the narrator. Louis's self-examination confirms the human need to define the self in relation to others. While the narrator admits to having come to terms with the sins of his immortal identity, it is only through placing his internal thoughts upon an external form of media that his notion of self becomes fully formed. In Interview With the Vampire, the need to justify the actions of the self for purposes of identity construction is answered by the blood-drinking narrator through verbal communication; the interview. It is not something that Louis wants but rather, as he tells the boy who interviews him, "Believe me, I won't hurt you. I want this opportunity. It's more important to me than you can realize now. I want you to begin." (Rice 4) At this point the reader is under the illusion that the interviewer is in control, but from the boy's first question, "How did it come about?", we see that Louis has his own agenda for the interview. He replies that "There's a simple answer to that. I don't believe I want to give simple answers . . I think I want to tell the real story . . ." (Rice 4) What is the "real story"?

Louis' interview is more than a simple confession. Louis intends to say, to quote T.S. Eliot, "'I am Lazarus, come from the dead\ Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" (Eliot 94-5) The interview is Louis' method to justify his previous attempts to define the self through his struggle with consumption and consummation. When Louis realizes that the interview has broken down, that one has settled a pillow by his head and said "That is not what I meant at all: that is not it at all" (Eliot 96), Louis' self-definition recedes. The communion ends. Louis attacks the interviewer and drinks his blood. (Rice 309-9).

"You don't know what human life is like!", the interviewer screams at the end of the interview. On the edge tears he says, "You've forgotten. You don't even understand the meaning of your own story." (Rice 308) The interviewer is correct, Louis does not understand his own story. Despite Louis' attempts to extricate a verbal definition of self, the interview proves inadequate. The finality of the action of drinking the interviewers blood becomes the only true definition of self. This action is Louis' oral defence, a fanged reply defining the reality of what he has become: a modern vampire, an eternal being who kills what he once was in order to survive.

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. trans. Hélene Iswolosky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Interview With the Vampire. Dir. Neil Jordan. Perf. Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas,Christian Slater and Stephen Rea. Videocassette. Geffen, 1994.

Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The American Tradition in Literature. Ed. George Perkins. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. Kilgour, Maggie.

From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1990.