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The first vampire to tell his story to a mortal. The protagonist of IV, Louis
describes to a young reporter what it has been and is like to be a vampire. After
nearly two centuries, he is weary of his existence. Rice originally intended his
tone to sound like that of Oscar Wilde. "He was supposed to be a sort of Geoge
Sanders type of character, world-weary and comical." However, Louis's voice changed
when Rice transferred her perspective from that of being the reporter to seeing
the experience through the eyes of Louis himself.
Louis is twenty five years old when he becomes a vampire in 1791. A plantation
owner in New Orleans, he owns seven other pieces of Louisiana property. He had
made himself vulnerable to the vampire Lestat while he was deep in grief over his
brother's death. Louis felt responsible for this death because his brother had
taken a fatal fall after Louis had refused his request to sell the plantation and use the money for religious work.
Lestat had then spotted Louis and had fallen in love with his< air of despair. Although Louis had been unable to accept the possible sainthood of his brother, he sees Lestat as an angel and suddenly knows ''totally the meaning of possibility." Lestat offered him immortality and Louis took it, although at first he had begged merely to be killed.
When he is transformed, Louis is amazed at the vividness of the world around him and at the love he feels for everything. Yet he is horrified by the necessity of killing mortals for survival. Louis is a dark-haired man of the shadows who prefers contemplation and reading to action and adventure. He does not look willingly into mirrors because he sees what he cannot control. An intellectual, Louis thinks through the consequences of his behaviour rather than acting on whim, as Lestat often does. He is impelled to search for answers to the ultimate questions of life, and is especially concerned to discover whether God exists, and if so, if that makes him a child of the Devil.
Although Louis soon despises Lestat and mourns his decision to become a vampire, he finds a new purpose when he helps Lestat to make Claudia, a five year old child, into a vampire. She comes to mean everything to him, and he attempts to keep her a child, despite the evidence that inside her tiny body she has matured into a woman. He accompanies Claudia to Europe and when she is destroyed, his world changes dramatically. Louis clings to Claudia's memory and resists the approach of another vampire, Armand, who is strongly attracted to him and who manipulated Claudia's destruction in order to gain Louis's exclusive companionship. By the end of his story, Louis seems cynical; he is unable to appreciate what a gift he has in immortality.
Lestat's perspective on Louis is that he is the most human of all the immortals, the least godlike. Louis was never able to surrender to his vampire identity, and, as a result, his memories are erroneous, the "sum of his flaws." He does not kill only evildoers - as Lestat does - because he is too passive to make any such judgements. In fact, he causes more innocent blood to be shed than many of the other vampires because he simply kills almost any person he runs into.
Resentful and dependent, Louis is never quite able to rise above his human needs and is limited by his fears. He experiences claustrophobia, fear of being alone, fear of heights, and fear of his own passion and freedom. He can not move into an indefinable immortality and spends much of his vampire existence looking for security, even if it means he must see himself as a child of the Devil and thus eternally damned.
