It's Hard out Here for an Immortal: Angst and Ennui in Interview with the Vampire and the Television Series Highlander

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abstract

This paper explores the ambivalence of psychological reactions to immortality. Immortal characters seem to assuage existential anxiety, by facilitating the desire for death transcendence, while simultaneously arousing concerns about the feasibility of immortality, by demonstrating how infinity might intensify the inherent problems of existence. Fictional depictions of immortality offer a means of posing, in a fantastical realm, ordinary existential questions that in reality we all should confront. The author contrasts the suffering of the character Louis, in Anne Rice's (1976) novel Interview with the Vampire, with the successful immortality of the character Duncan …