What is "it"?

For discussion of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Låt den rätte komma in
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ltroifanatic
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What is "it"?

Post by ltroifanatic » Mon Dec 18, 2017 12:12 pm

I'm curious about the parasite that's infected Eli.Is it sentient?And if so has it a personality?Emotions?..Is it a one-off mutation that's evolved in parallel with humans or is it maybe a mutation of human origin? Sometimes it seems Eli talks to it and it talks back?..Sometimes it seems it can take over Eli.Has Eli's love for Oskar made it possible for him to gain control in as much as he would never hurt Oskar?..Finally if even a tiny percentage of infected survived mishaps and suicide, taking into account their longevity and insatiable hunger ,wouldn't there be lots and lots of vampires? I apologise if I've gotten the above observations wrong.I often amalgamate the book,movie and FF and end up with a weird hybrid lol. :lol: .Any thoughts or opinions? :think:
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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Re: What is "it"?

Post by sauvin » Mon Dec 18, 2017 7:23 pm

ltroifanatic wrote:I'm curious about the parasite that's infected Eli.Is it sentient?And if so has it a personality?Emotions?..Is it a one-off mutation that's evolved in parallel with humans or is it maybe a mutation of human origin? Sometimes it seems Eli talks to it and it talks back?..Sometimes it seems it can take over Eli.Has Eli's love for Oskar made it possible for him to gain control in as much as he would never hurt Oskar?..Finally if even a tiny percentage of infected survived mishaps and suicide, taking into account their longevity and insatiable hunger ,wouldn't there be lots and lots of vampires? I apologise if I've gotten the above observations wrong.I often amalgamate the book,movie and FF and end up with a weird hybrid lol. :lol: .Any thoughts or opinions? :think:
The novel doesn't say much about it. There's a reference to its cells looking an awful lot like brain cells, I think, and it colonises on the heart. What kind of intelligence it might have is an open question.

However, for real-life comparison, have a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocord ... ilateralis
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Re: What is "it"?

Post by ltroifanatic » Tue Dec 19, 2017 1:07 am

Zombie ants..ewww.Maybe I'm over thinking it.The parasite in Eli may be like the parasite that attacks the ants.A thing of total instinct.Evolved not to think but to eat and procreate.No emotions, just doing what it has evolved to do.Prey on a very specific host (us). :think:
Please Oskar.Be me for a little while.

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metoo
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Re: What is "it"?

Post by metoo » Tue Dec 19, 2017 5:38 am

As sauvin says, the novel doesn’t say much about whether the infection is sentient. It does seem to say, though, that the “heart-brain” is capable of governing the host’s body on it’s own. But it doesn’t need to be sentient to accomplish that - even the very limited brain of a lowly creature such as a spider produces an efficient predator.

On three occasions in the novel we get some hints about this. The most explicit is Virginia’s impression that she was passively witnessing from behind when something else controlled her actions and prepared to attack Gösta. Then we have Eli’s behaviour in the basement, when Eli seems to fight something that threatened to take control over his actions. Both of these seem to say that the infection is separate and has a mind of its own. But then there is the scene where Eli attacks the cancer sick woman. This entire event is told from Eli’s perspective, and he seems to be in full control. He is not presented as different from the Eli that plays with Oskar.

So, the question is open. It has of course been discussed before on this forum, but I don’t think there is any consensus.
Last edited by metoo on Tue Dec 19, 2017 11:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: What is "it"?

Post by sauvin » Tue Dec 19, 2017 5:57 am

metoo wrote:As savuvin says, the novel doesn’t say much about whether the infection is sentient. It does seem to say, though, that the “heart-brain” is capable of governing the host’s body on it’s own. But it doesn’t need to be sentient to accomplish that - even the very limited brain of a lowly creature such as a spider produces an efficient predator.

On three occasions in the novel we get some hints about this. The most explicit is Virginia’s impression that she was passively witnessing from behind when something else controlled her actions and prepared to attack Gösta. Then we have Eli’s behaviour in the basement, when Eli seems to fight something that threatened to take control over his actions. Both of these seem to say that the infection is separate and has a mind of its own. But then there is the scene where Eli attacks the cancer sick woman. This entire event is told from Eli’s perspective, and he seems to be in full control. He is not presented as different from the Eli that plays with Oskar.

So, the question is open. It has of course been discussed before on this forum, but I don’t think there is any consensus.
I don't think there's any consensus, either, but with respect to the cancer woman, my take is that Eli would have learned after a couple of centuries she's going to eat, whether she likes it or not, and whether the circumstances are convenient or not. This "something else" that Eli struggles to control in the basement clubhouse scene, one presumes, can take over completely when it's hungry enough and just leave its host to deal with the fallout however it can. The only real control Eli has over the beast is to anticipate that loss of control by eating while she's the one calling the shots, not the beast, although Eli may well also exert a degree of control by distancing herself from temptation.

ltroifanatic, if you've not run across it yet, you may find "The Girl with All the Gifts" interesting. In it, a form of the very same claviceps somehow infects huge masses of people within a very short time. There are some very interesting parallels between the girl and Eli, and the different pathogens infecting them. It's not a romance or bromance or anything of the sort, it's much more in the zombie apocalypse realm, but I found it moving in many respects.
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Re: What is "it"?

Post by a_contemplative_life » Tue Dec 19, 2017 11:59 am

ltroifanatic wrote:I'm curious about the parasite that's infected Eli.Is it sentient?And if so has it a personality?Emotions?..Is it a one-off mutation that's evolved in parallel with humans or is it maybe a mutation of human origin? Sometimes it seems Eli talks to it and it talks back?..Sometimes it seems it can take over Eli.Has Eli's love for Oskar made it possible for him to gain control in as much as he would never hurt Oskar?..Finally if even a tiny percentage of infected survived mishaps and suicide, taking into account their longevity and insatiable hunger ,wouldn't there be lots and lots of vampires? I apologise if I've gotten the above observations wrong.I often amalgamate the book,movie and FF and end up with a weird hybrid lol. :lol: .Any thoughts or opinions? :think:
I tend to think of it as distilled and externalized human selfishness.
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Re: What is "it"?

Post by metoo » Tue Dec 19, 2017 12:27 pm

sauvin wrote:I don't think there's any consensus, either, but with respect to the cancer woman, my take is that Eli would have learned after a couple of centuries she's going to eat, whether she likes it or not, and whether the circumstances are convenient or not. This "something else" that Eli struggles to control in the basement clubhouse scene, one presumes, can take over completely when it's hungry enough and just leave its host to deal with the fallout however it can. The only real control Eli has over the beast is to anticipate that loss of control by eating while she's the one calling the shots, not the beast, although Eli may well also exert a degree of control by distancing herself from temptation.
An issue here is whether the infection is a separate and (to some degree) sentient being occupying the same body as the host. The novel is inconclusive, but my idea is that the infection doesn't need to have a mind of its own to give the host the impression that there is something else sharing his body. The human mind is less a single entity than we usually believe, and more like a set of units that are coordinated by what we might call "the self". That's why we can do things like reading the news while walking down the street. So, perhaps what happens is that the infection reduces the influence of the self, while enticing other mental "sub-units" to act as needed. The sensation to the host would be what Virginia experiences in the novel, I think. Needless to say, this doesn't contradict what sauvin said - there might still be a struggle if the host has different goals than the infection, and the host would eventually learn what to do to avoid the feeling of not being in control.

Now, for my fan fiction I have contemplated the problem whether Oskar and Eli would be dangerous to each other. I have come up with the following solution to this dilemma.

A basic assumption would be that the infection is a very simple creature, controlled largely by instincts and basic feelings such as fear and hunger. It would furthermore share the feelings of the host in a two-way manner. Thus, the extreme mental storm of fear and anguish that Eli must have felt when he almost couldn't resist attacking Oskar in the basement would have been such an unpleasant experience to the infection that it would thereafter have considered Oskar as non-food.

That would make Oskar safe from Eli - but what about the reverse? Well, perpahs Oskar did attack Eli soon after having been infected, but while he still was rather feeble. Eli would have then been quite able to defend himself, and would not have been seriously hurt anyway. Oskar, however, would have been shocked, and this would result in a protection for Eli thereafter.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: What is "it"?

Post by SpartanAltego » Tue Dec 19, 2017 5:05 pm

It's an infection; it doesn't really think or reason the same way the cells of a tumor don't think or reason. All it can express is instincts and urges, powerful ones at that: eat, survive, become, hide (from the sun). It can supplant the higher thought processes of a host, betraying its parasitic nature, to fulfill those urges. Similar parasites can be found throughout nature, playing puppeteer to the brains of aquatic life and so on.

That's from a realist perspective, anyway. When it comes down to it, LtROI is explicitly a story of reality meeting the supernatural, and considering the vampirism as portrayed in the story as just a disease would be obtuse. It's a curse, hiding behind a veneer of biology and logic simply so that the mundane world needn't become aware of the wolves among the flock. The second brain on the heart, the strange cellular activity noted in Hakan's remains, all of it is just window dressing that doesn't serve to explain, only to distract. There are no answers to be found in dissection, study, or examination of the aspects of the curse that can be seen.

As far as I see it, "it" is just a physical representation of what the curse does to the victims psychologically and, forgive the wording, spiritually - what it does to your soul (whatever meaning one applies to the word). The location being on the heart is rather telling, because the heart is widely considered among cultures to be the emotional and moral center of a human being. The infection taints your sense of right and wrong, your ability to live a good and compassionate life, by making survival and the notion of 'good' effectively incompatible. It's an open wound on the heart (in the symbolic sense) that festers and continually bleeds pus into your healthy spirit, never sealing.

When the victim is alive, they can try to stay as human as they can; Eli being the prime example. Some people succumb to the spiritual cancer and become hollowed out, such as the adult vampire: hollow in soul. Others commit suicide to defy the infection and the moral pain that comes with it.

The other end of the spectrum, where I really draw my interpretation of "it" being an affliction of the heart, comes from Hakan's return as an undead. Emptied of any remaining human qualities such as his guilt over his pedophiliac appetites, he single-mindedly pursues two objectives throughout his stay in the story. One, the consumption of blood, the basic drive of the curse. The second drive, to find and fulfill his sexual desire of Eli - despite being brain-dead and otherwise devoid of conciousness. Why, after all, would a mass of tumor/brain cells care about sexual reproduction to such an intense level, when no other vampire exhibits such lust?

It's because, again, the heart represents the good in ourselves - and the tumor represents all the selfishness, the evil, the desire to assert ourselves over others. When Hakan's heart still beat, he tried (to a degree of selfish and selflessness) to hold himself to some kind of standard. At the least, he needed to rationalize his attraction to Eli as justified because of their age difference - he couldn't go through with hiring the child prostitute and felt compelled to give him money as an act of kindness. He still had a heart, twisted by time, his choices, and his circumstances though it was.

Then his heart stopped beating (and never resumed, as Eli notices when he punches through Hakan's ribs to crush it). Any good in Hakan died, and all that was left alive in him was the evil. The evil of murder and the evil of rape. He becomes solely an avatar of destruction, killing and bringing suffering to everything in his wake with no consideration to anything else.

Eli is alive, and his heart is still beating; that means his capacity for good is still alive, so long as he continues to fight. It's like he tells Oskar:

"Are you...dead?"

"Do I look dead?"
"The dark is patient, and it always wins. But its weakness lies in its strength: a single candle is enough to hold it at bay. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars." - Matthew Stover

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Re: What is "it"?

Post by dongregg » Tue Dec 19, 2017 7:21 pm

Well put in all of its particulars, metoo. Although integrated necessarily into a whole, the brain has specialized functions, and those associated with approach/avoidance decisions take place largely beneath the cognizance of our consciousness.
A basic assumption would be that the infection is a very simple creature, controlled largely by instincts and basic feelings such as fear and hunger. It would furthermore share the feelings of the host in a two-way manner. Thus, the extreme mental storm of fear and anguish that Eli must have felt when he almost couldn't resist attacking Oskar in the basement would have been such an unpleasant experience to the infection that it would thereafter have considered Oskar as non-food.
However, in applying this to our favorite Eliform being, we could discern his behavior to be, in outline, particularly human; that is, without depending on a second being occupying space in his body. It requires a dietary change to fresh human blood. The Eliform compulsion to dine need not exceed the human compulsion to eat, ravenously in the case of near starvation. Donner Pass notwithstanding, the forbearance to not eat one's relatives, friends, and pets coexists with the compulsion to eat and therefore to live.
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Re: What is "it"?

Post by metoo » Tue Dec 19, 2017 9:07 pm

dongregg wrote:However, in applying this to our favorite Eliform being, we could discern his behavior to be, in outline, particularly human; that is, without depending on a second being occupying space in his body. It requires a dietary change to fresh human blood. The Eliform compulsion to dine need not exceed the human compulsion to eat, ravenously in the case of near starvation. Donner Pass notwithstanding, the forbearance to not eat one's relatives, friends, and pets coexists with the compulsion to eat and therefore to live.
Well, the novel depicts Eli as having a serious struggle not to attack Oskar in the basement, quite far exceeding normal human compulsion to eat. This poses the question I tried to answer, i.e. how could Oskar and Eli stay physically close together also when ill fed? Wouldn't the urge to feed overpower them and make closeness impossible - in particular just before and after the daily resting periods, when their human minds are "shut off" and the infection is in sole control? Since I'd like the answer to the latter question to be no, I found it necessary to invent an explanation for myself about how this could become a non-issue.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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