Thank You, Vampires for Showing Us What Not to Be

            As I roll up an old magazine to kill yet another mosquito that has found its way into our home, Foster’s words resonate with me, “placing our desires…above the needs of others.” This led me to ponder whether I was a “vampire” as Foster had described. It was, after all, “Just a fly,” but that statement seems to conform even more so than before to Foster’s definition of a vampire. In the end, I decided to do away with the insect due to the possibility of him (or her) having West Nile Virus and infecting my whole family. After all, the mosquito was the real vampire, living off our blood. I am much more at peace with my decision knowing that I rescued my family from the perils of the West Nile Virus; I had done them an invaluable service. So you can rest assured, I am not a vampire.

            So who is? Or, more specifically, who are the vampires in literature and why do they need to exist in stories? Foster defined vampires as someone who is strengthened by another’s enervation. This certainly broadens the scope of identifying vampires beyond the conventional blood-sucking, Dracula-like, undead young man or woman. However, this classic definition helps to find the figurative vampires in literature. The “sucking of blood” can symbolize or correlate to the fact that the vampire is getting stronger while his/her victim is getting weaker with the blood representing things like hope, innocence, happiness, or love. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath contains numerous figurative vampires that feed off of both the Joad Family and the numerous other families like them. The biggest vampires are the rich, voracious landowners who give miniscule payment to starving families to do demeaning and tedious work. The Joad family encounters vampires throughout California and they slowly deprecate their hope that they will find a lasting, adequate job to help sustain their family. thousands of people suffer while a small group of people, the vampires, prospers. This theme is engrained in the reader throughout the novel and, unless you are a sociopath, causes the reader to feel an enmity and rancor towards the people besetting this anguish upon the Okies. The presence of the vampires causes the reader to feel an immense compassion and to get a taste of the misery and desolation that family’s like the Joad’s experienced. Our consciences are immediately inflamed when we see someone suffering especially when the suffering occurs for the benefit of another. We see these atrocities occur in literature, and we are hopefully moved enough by the evil doings of vampires to prevent the same from happening in the real world. The vampire stories help us to recognize the vampires in real life, or to recognize, as I thought I did, if we ourselves are vampires.

            The indecision that I felt when rolling up that magazine was the type of self-reflection that author’s writing of vampires (both figurative and literal) wanted in their readers regardless of the magnitude of the decision. After all, that is why we read: to not only broaden our perspective of the world, but to improve our personal character, to eradicate the vampires within ourselves.