Reading Interview With The Vampire As An Initiation Story

Anne Rice is rated and applauded as one of the most distinguished novelists of the contemporary American literature,who stunned the literary world in 1976 with her breath-taking novel Interview With the Vampire.At the time of its publication,the novel gained immediate and immense attention,in which Anne Rice creates a host of vampire characters and tells a fascinating story of three protagonists who form a weird vampire family,focusing on the conflicting emotions of love and hatred within the vampire family.Over the years,critics and scholars have studied this novel from a multitude of perspectives.Nonetheless,none study has,so far,been conducted of the novel as an initiation story.Based on the theories of the specific literary genre,Initiation Story,this thesis makes an analysis of the growing and maturing processes of the protagonists by dividing their initiation into three stages: innocence,experiences,and maturity,while at the same time exploring the incentives for their individual initiation.Also,a study is made of the basic elements of an initiation story in this novel,including initiation guides and moments of epiphany.Finally,in view of the differences in the protagonists’ initiation between traditional and vampire stories,a comparison is attempted with a view to highlighting the specialness of the novel featuring both initiation and vampirism.Hopefully,the thesis can provide a new perspective on the study of Interview With the Vampire.