Evil

"Criag lay motionless and wondered, with a clarity of mind he had not experienced in many, many days, whether he dreaded going back to the world because the world was evil, or whether it was because he felt he himself was tainted, unfit to mix with human beings again."

This passage touches on the theme of this short story. Bixby forces us to ask ourselves, what is evil? And then, how do we respond to it? Craig is very confused with how to respond. He feels like a violated victim and all at once an enabler of a terrible evil. He keeps imagining his father saying this wrong, you are wrong if you are a part of this. But he has a relationship with teh vampire that disproves all preconceived notions and suspicions about them. Why should he feel guilty about sharing life with a friend?The peace of the ocean and vast night sky above give Craig the ability to ponder all of these questions, and what he himself believes.

Should Craig have fought for his life earlier? Is there a strict definition of evil, that vampires indisputably fall into?

Share Alike!

(I see that the two people below me also posted on nearly the same thing, and I'm sorry that mine isn't very different or original--I wrote it last night before seeing any of the others. I guess I should have written about homosexuality after all... Oh well.)

Page 117:

“Still, deep in his mind, Craig’s conscience wailed. Legend, history, the church, all at one time or another had said that vampires were evil. He was submitting to a vampire; therefore, he was submitting to evil. Food or no food, the Reverend Craig would never have submitted.”

To what extent should we listen to the advice of our fathers? Do divisive lines between “good” and “evil” protect us or prejudice us? These are important questions the authors ask in Share Alike, ones that I don’t think necessarily have easy answers.

On one hand, Hofmanstahal’s vigilant, predatory presence is disturbing and clearly not as “symbiotic” as he claims. Vampires are well known to charm and exploit others, leaving behind them a wreckage of helpless followers. On the other hand, people are predisposed to think this way about them from the causes mentioned above, “legend, history, [and] the church.” In many ways, Hofmanstahal defies the traditional concept of a vampire--for example, he doesn’t feed on a beautiful virgin like folklore would have it, but another grown man (the homosexual connotations here are intended, I’m sure). The reader can sympathize with him because at times he seems caring, or at least we can say he does not explicitly value his desires over Craig’s needs, like a traditional vampire would. If we condemn Hofmanstahal as evil, we must also recognize a similar hypocrisy in human beings, in that we too kill and “give nothing in return for the food [we] so brutally take” (112).

So is Craig’s gut right in feeling that this vampire is bad news? Since his conscience is inseparable from the image of his father, it seems impossible to tell whether or not this is protective intuition/morality or conditioned prejudice. Indeed, by the end of the story, the “hallucination” of Craig’s father has fled, and it’s up to individual interpretation whether Craig has sinned and thereby shamed and disgusted his father, or whether he has cared adequately enough for Hofmanstahal that the bias against vampires spurred by tradition has been broken.

Discussion: How does Craig’s opinion of Hofmanstahal change throughout the story? Is this change of opinion genuine or can it be attributed to the hypnotic venom?

Share Alike

“We drink from the fountain of life while man feasts at the fleshpots of the dead; yet we are called the monsters.” (pg. 116)

Hofmanstahal mentions this to Craig as he is refuting the myths associated with being a vampire. This line stands out to me because it seems to foreshadow the end of the story. Hofmanstahal is the monster, yet Craig is the one who ends up committing the monstrous act that results in the vampire’s death. This story seems to emphasize the effects that society has on a person. Craig often considers matters from his father’s perspective, and recalls that church and history have determined vampires to be evil, and consequently he may now be evil as well. He fluctuates between this odd “symbiotic relationship” and feelings of guilt or being tainted. In the end, the fear of being witnessed by people on the boat leads him to knock Hofmanstahal off the boat. This is ironic in that the character who has been referred to as evil by society is actually the one who ends up the victim.

What do you think the author’s main purpose for writing this piece was? Was this the ending you were predicting while reading the story?

Waves

"And Hofmanstahal, vampire or not, was an interesting conversationalist"


The human behavior that we see illustrated in "Share Alike" is candid and satirical. They end up bonding in a sudo-sexual symbiotic relationship that Craig thoroughly enjoys and even revels in the thought of the intimate act. His conversion from repulsion to appreciation of Hofmanstahal's vampire needs and his swing back to repulsion are solely guided by society. Craig's rejection of their newly developed relationship is a product of what he thinks the Navy men and also his father would think of him, showing that no matter how dire the situation is, society still guides people's actions. His father's disgusted face floats above them in the night, a sign of familial dissent that he has experienced in the past. Craig realizes when he pushes Eric into the water that he has symbolically lost what he cared for in turn for the approval of others, which is something that everybody faces in life, no matter what your lifestyle.

Is Craig a victim of society or conformity?