Lestat

Lestat's character is an interesting one, isn't it? Especially when compared to Louis's. Louis almost instantly dislikes him as soon as he has a feeling for what it is to be a vampire... he despises the way Lestat goes about things, simply because it seems disrespectful to the experience of being an undead.

Now, Louis did not seem to be particularly high-strung before his transformation. He was well-off, I suppose, and uses the term "vicious egotism" in reference to himself... and he mentions that he had looked down on his black workers before the transformation. Still, he didn't seem to think of himself as a higher, special class. Perhaps he wanted to, perhaps he longed to be... but he was grounded on some level. As a vampire, though, he automatically sees it as a sort of beautiful thing... and he automatically feels as if he is a special, privileged being and that Lestat disrespects that.

Lestat, meanwhile, seems so far to be very engaged with human matters. His father. The plantation. He doesn't care to highlight the transformation in Louis, and probably not simply because he doesn't care for Louis, but that he doesn't care for being a vampire.

Are they foils of each other?

Interview with the Vampire was written in 1976, but in 1985 Anne Rice published a second novel in a "series"... the Vampire Lestat. I haven't done much research on it, but when I saw this, I looked briefly at what Wikipedia had to say. Evidently, the events of the two books contradict each other... ... so that it is clear that the narrators are unreliable.

Perhaps this is why the story is told the way it is?

And perhaps we should note the interplay between Louis and Lestat when reading, so we can try to decide what's really going on... and whether Lestat is really as bad as he's made out to be so far.