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?