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« on: June 01, 2009, 02:12:53 PM »
We're meant to know that Barnabas is acting rashly and irrationally, since it's clear that Carl had told the secret and Barnabas didn't even find out before acting. I think all this was a combination of the fact that Barnabas's violent vampire nature was always a huge force that he could not always control, and the fact that we're all "human", and when our backs are up against the wall, often we behave out of blind panic. An idea that has been helpful to me in different situations is that some moments in life fill our heads with exclamation points, crowding out everything else, including capacity for reason. It's not that we forget to reason, we just can't. Our heads are overloaded.
I'm not sure Barnabas ever realized that his vampire nature was acting upon him. Almost always people assume that they have total free will. And I'm talking about all of us! Barnabas's larger ego from (1) being a vampire and (2) being from a priveleged background (though he was a decent example of that) would have made it even harder to perceive. I'm sure that if Magda had explained to him how vampiric he actually came across, day to day, Barnabas would have been surprised.
Anyway, now that I see 1897 Barnabas in this way, a 1969 spirit deluding himself that he's in control of a cursed 1897 Barnabas whose soul he's over-riding consciously but who may actually be in control on a deeper, perhaps more important level, I see 1897 very differently than I did as a child. It's more interesting this way, but I have to give up my heroic or sympathetic Barnabas figure. Or maybe I don't. I care more about conficted figures and did even as a child, I think, so maybe I got it back then more than I knew. And I never liked heroes that much come to think of it!