Fledgling

“Wright told me what he remembered about vampires—that they’re immortal unless someone stabs them in the heart with a wooden stake, and yet even without being stabbed they’re dead, or undead. Whatever that means. They drink blood, they have no reflection in mirrors, they can become bats or wolves, they turn other people into vampires either by drinking their blood or by making the convert drink the vampire’s blood. This last detail seemed to depend on which story you were reading or which movie you were watching. That was the other thing about vampires. They were fictional beings. Folklore. There were no vampires.”

As Shori Matthews starts to research her identity, she is left with more questions than answers. The Clash of Fictional Stories and Reality on the internet furthers her growing identity crisis: If vampires are fictional, how can she exist? The world seems to abide by contradictory rules, so she must first eliminate these contradictions to get to the truth.

“I touched my face and the short fuzz of black hair on my head, and I tried to see someone I recognized. I was a lean, sharp-faced, large-eyed, brown-skinned person—a complete stranger. Did I look like a child of about ten or eleven? Was I? How could I know?...‘I don’t know this person,’ I said. ‘It’s as though I’ve never seen her before.’”

Shori’s reflection is a stranger to her because she has no memory of her life before waking in the cave. She is essentially a new person, which she gradually comes to accept throughout the novel. This is the first moment in which Shori is confronted with her fragmented identity. She sees herself as Wright and other strangers do: a mysterious young girl finding her place in the world.

“He bent over me. I could feel him there, warm—a large, edible-smelling patch of warmth—so tempting to my starving, damaged body and to my damaged mind. Close enough to touch. And I grabbed him and I tore out his throat and I ate him. I was capable of that. I had done that. I sat for a long time, stunned, not knowing what to think…The man had known me. He had cared about me. Perhaps I had had a relationship with him like the one I was developing with Wright. I must have had such relationships with someone—several someones. How could I have killed such a person?”

The juxtaposition of an animalistic, instinctive act—killing a human stranger and eating him—with Shori’s developing sense of Morality is key. Although she remembers nothing of her previous life, she knows killing the man in the cave was wrong. She is constantly confronting her dual nature as an amoral creature beyond human judgment and a half-human girl learning right and wrong.