Back again with part 2! Like I said in part 1 this is mainly for my own peace of mind. I don't expect to change any minds. Every one draws upon their own lived experiences when they engage in any form of media, and anyone who already doesn't care for Nicki isn't going to bother reading a random person's essay on the subject.
But if you do read this, thank you.
I'm going to back up a bit in my ramblings to expound on some things that I touched upon in my last post. I was only going by memory before (as I don't actually have a copy of TVL on hand), but I saw a photo of the passage I was thinking of and I realized that it isn't even so simple a matter of Nicki needing and resenting Lestat's light while feeling like he could only offer darkness. No - he felt like this darkness inside him actively harmed Lestat.
"You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep the darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don’t need the darkness."
This does not read to me like someone who didn't care about Lestat and wanted to hurt him and conspired to bring them both down from the moment they decided to go to Paris. This reads to me like someone who cares very much, but has so little self-worth that they can find no value in themselves. To the point where they think their very existence brings harm to those around them. It infects them.
Worse, the night at the inn he is referring to is one where Nicki played his violin for Lestat for the first time, after Lestat had begged him to play.
Lestat described Nicki's playing as using his "whole body to lean into the music" and to "press his soul like an ear to the instrument". Regardless of how inexperienced Nicki was, Lestat felt the heart, the entirety of Nicki's being, pour into the bow and strings.
But Lestat is overcome. He begins to cry.
Nicki's response is to sit with him, hug him, ask why he is crying. Lestat senses that Nicki is "overwhelmed" by the effect his music had on him.
At the time I don't think he believed this, but as the depression began to take hold, Nicki would look back on this night and his cynicism wouldn't allow him to believe that his music had brought Lestat light and goodness that night. Rather, he wonders if that was the first sign of corruption. That this thing he was so passionate about that he was willing to risk his family's wrath to pursue it - running away from law school, selling his textbooks, taking lessons with Mozart - could infect those around him with the darkness inside him.
I think one could almost interpret Nicki's violin, his music, as representative of his soul; and his soul as representative of his music. They almost seem to have a symbiotic relationship to each other. As his hopes and dreams falter and fade in Paris, so too does his mental state deteriorate.
When he later plays his violin to an unseen Lestat, the music was his despair - but it was also the one modicum of hope he had left. The same paradox. Despair and hope. Sin and goodness. Darkness and light.
(And it will be the same violin that will eventually awaken Nicki from his comatose state after being granted the Dark Gift. Almost as if his soul had been returned to him, only now it truly has been corrupted by resentment, trauma, and pain. There is a fine line between love and hate.)
He is so lost in the fog of his own mind that he can't see the things Lestat loves about him, the light that he does bring to Lestat's life (and I believe at one point Lestat does describe Nicki as having a light. He does love and value Nicki's presence in his life even if Nicki himself cannot accept or believe it). When they first arrived in Paris there were times that Nicki helped to support them by busking in the streets. When Lestat began acting, Nicki supported Lestat by helping him with his lines, because Lestat was unable to read (and if this was brought up in the text, please jog my memory, as I'm not sure if Nicki was told that the actual reason Lestat couldn't read was due to his family neglecting his education). There was no doubt frustration at times. But clearly Nicki helped Lestat, even as his own dreams were slipping through his fingers, as Lestat was able to thrive at the theatre.
"Our Conversation" was freedom, love, emotional connection, acknowledgement; art and beauty; disagreement and philosophy. It was all the wonderful things in Lestat's life that he had never gotten from home, and it was only possible because they were both driven to the impossible.
(As a show related aside, with Lestat being given a stutter I feel like "Our Conversation" has the potential to be even more meaningful, especially for Lestat, who can finally talk to someone for hours on end without being shamed for it.)
Nicki probably feels incredibly selfish, even cowardly, because of this need for him - digging himself even deeper into this cycle of self-loathing and despair. Even though he has this very real feeling that he is bringing Lestat down - that Lestat would surely be better off without him - he does need Lestat's light. He is desperately afraid to be alone. The light is the one thing keeping him afloat in Paris. His dreams of being a great violinist have fallen apart. I think we can assume that by running off to Paris he has effectively burned his bridges with his family. Lestat is all he has left.
And the only way to hold on to the light requires him to keep what he perceives as an irreparable part of his very being from Lestat for as long as possible.
There is no tall therapy or SSRI's in 18th century France.
Nicki later says that he took up the violin in the first place to hurt others, but I also don't think that's true.
I think this is perhaps a chicken and egg scenario: Nicki genuinely fell in love with the violin, but that love came at the expense of the people around him - namely his family. They placed their hopes on him as the eldest son. We don't get many glimpses into his home life, but his father threatened to break his hands if he played the violin and he still chose to defy him and do it anyway.
That makes him "evil" in his own eyes.
If we continue with the violin as his soul metaphor, his desire to create music is an extension of that soul. He sees time and time again that his "soul" causes pain and suffering in others while not being good enough for any of the respectable theatres. Despite this, he continued to choose to pursue something purely for himself (he said he was 'playing for himself', as if that inherently made the art "bad" and therefore holding no value. Possibly because, again, he didn't place any value on himself and what he deserved), rather than abide the "higher purpose" the wheels of society expected of him. In his mind, this must mean that he wished to cause hurt. Trapped in the engulfing roots of depression, he sees no other way.
The one thing to always keep in mind is that we never, ever get Nicki's perspective. Everything is through Lestat's lens, both of what he observes and what others are willing to say to him in that moment.
By the time Nicki says this, the resentment, anger, pain, trauma, and self-loathing have festered into a gaping wound. The darkness, the depression, has been amplified, consuming him beyond reason. He no longer tries to keep Lestat from this darkness. Instead, he uses it to lash out and push him away.
As I said in the first part, Nicki threw his pain outward; Louis drove it further inward.
Self-sabotage is one symptom of mental illness, and I do believe Nicki employed this judiciously. I believe by this point he was convinced that he was beyond saving. That he was truly evil. That he deserved punishment.
By this point he wanted to provoke and hurt Lestat. He wanted to put his pain somewhere - the long nights spent replaying the moment your lover was abducted from your bed screaming your name, and not knowing if he was alive or dead; being told repeatedly that the man you came to Paris for had left to marry someone else without so much of a word and being expected to be happy for him. To be expected to be content to receive his gifts, when what you really wanted was to speak to him, to understand; him resurfacing at the theater, but when you go to embrace him he pushes you away. Then he performs preternatural (had to include at least one use of that word, haha) feats on stage, scaring the patrons. You witness him being shot with your very eyes, only for him to run off again; you go to your former lover's dying mother - and you are under no obligation after these long weeks, months, feeling abandoned, as if your worries had all been a mockery - but you do it anyway. There is still no explanation for anything, when your relationship had been built from the backbone of "Our Conversation". They are in the room alone for an indiscriminate amount of time, only to find that they had both disappeared. You were pushed away, but his mother had been taken into the fold. It's only after you are rescued from being captured, tortured, fed on and nearly burned to death by a Coven of otherworldly creatures that you finally discover the truth of what has been kept from you.
But by then it is too late.
I guess that is kind of the crux of it in the end: a relationship built on open conversation falls apart when truths are withheld. Understandable though they may be.
Even though Lestat had very valid reasons for doing what he did. And there is still no guarantee that anything would have worked out even if he had told Nicki the truth of it, which only adds to the tragedy of their relationship. I think they both made mistakes. Neither of them is perfect. Lestat never asked to be made into a vampire. Nicki coped with his own pain by provocation, causing hurt.
Again I must emphasize that we only get Lestat's perspective. We know all the horrific details of the ordeal he was, literally, dragged through. We know that he is struggling with the raging desire to feed on Nicki, to take his life, when he sees him again in the theatre. We know how much he wants to protect Nicki from what he has become against his will.
But Nicki knows none of it. He knows what he was told, and for the longest time he was told by others that Lestat was fine.
And sometimes when people judge him for how he treats Lestat I think they lose this perspective. Personally, I just can't see Nicki as some conniving manipulator, conspiring to bring Lestat down from the moment they first met. Like so many characters in the Vampire Chronicles, there is nuance.
I do agree that spite was a part of Nicki's decision to go to Paris, clearly, but that still doesn't mean he intended to fail from the word go. Succeeding would have proven something to his family too, after all. And to himself.
But that is something I'm going to expand on in a future part.
There is another factor as well that I'm going to save for a separate post, which is religious trauma. But I'm nearing the limit again, so that's all for part 2. I think after I'm done I should try to edit everything together into one cohesive essay for a better reading experience. This reads very, very much like a first draft. But thank you again if you made it this far!
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