Dracula is an action-packed story about vampires and how to kill them without being bitten. Because it's told from multiple points of view through a collection of diary entries, letters, and notes, there's not a lot of dead space (no pun intended). The story moves along at a pretty good clip, so there's never time to be bored.

PersonalThis is hardly surprising, since the novel is composed of a series of personal letters and journal entries. Supposedly, the writers of the letters and journals didn't intend them for anyone else's eyes as they were writing them. Some of the letters and journal entries include some pretty personal stuff:There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and atthe same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burningdesire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good tonote this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause herpain; but it is the truth. (3.29)Um, yeah. Mina would probably not be too keen on her hubby-to-be getting all hot and bothered over some undead damsels.

But it's snippets like this that give us the illusion that we're reading something super-private.And that personal tone adds to the illusion of realism in the novel: The documents we're reading seem more legit because we can imagine real people (as opposed to fictional characters) writing them. Genre. Novel; Adventure, Fantasy, Horror/Gothic FictionDracula is a novel. But what, exactly, is a novel? 'Novel' is one of the loosest categories to describe literature out there. A novel is a work of fiction, usually written in prose (not poetry), and it's usually pretty long.

Dracula definitely fits all those criteria, so we're going to call it a novel—despite that totally misleading author's note (check out ) that claims this book is nonfiction.But what kind of novel is it? It's such a complicated text that it can fit in several different categories.There's a lot of action and a lot of risk-taking, so we could call it adventure fiction. After all, Jonathan Harker shimmies down the side of a castle over a rocky abyss to escape from blood-thirsty vampires. That's an Indiana Jones-caliber move.It could also be called a fantasy novel, because—spoiler alert—vampires don't really exist. But because it's about vampires (and not fairies and unicorns) it's not just fantasy: It's horror or Gothic fiction. Some folks even like to call Dracula an early work of science fiction, because of Stoker's obsession with super modern (for the time) technologies, like blood transfusions and phonographs. What's Up With the Title?

The name 'Dracula' is synonymous with vampires for most people. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone, anywhere, who doesn't immediately know who 'Count Dracula' is. (If you do, they're probably a vampire trying to fake you out.)So it's hard to believe that when the novel first came out in 1897, no one had any such associations. Some folks complain that the final chapters of Dracula are boring—after all, the 'chase' really just involves Van Helsing, Harker, Mina, Arthur, Dr.

Seward, and Quincey Morris twiddling their thumbs in Varna while waiting for Dracula's ship to come in. Transylvania and EnglandTime and place are super important in Dracula. Basically, the world (or at least the continent of Europe) was seen as a newly-shrunken place in ultra-modern 1897. And London was starting to seem more than a little creeptastic.The first line of the novel is a complaint about late trains, so you know from page one that geography is going to be crucial. The characters move around from city to city and from country to country—even from one end of Europe to the other—with remarkable speed.

Stoker makes a point of describing all the state-of-the-art, up-to-date, high-tech transportation.Mina describes herself as a 'train fiend'—she memorizes train schedules just for the heck of it, in case it might be useful in the future to know the exact times you could catch a train from point A to point B. Get a new hobby, girl.)And the up-to-dateness of the technology is likewise important. Stoker wanted to make sure that readers felt like the novel was taking place now. When 'now' meant '1897.' This is hard for modern readers to remember, since telegrams are now obsolete and trains aren't as commonly used for long-distance transportation.

But if Stoker were writing now, he'd have Jonathan Harker tweeting from Castle Dracula and Van Helsing taking a bullet train through the Chunnel under the English Channel.So moving around is important in Dracula, but where exactly are they? Transylvania, where the novel starts, is in southeastern Europe. It's part of modern-day Romania. Castle Dracula is located on the eastern side of Romania, close to the Black Sea. From there, the action moves to Whitby, which is a real town on the Yorkshire coast of Great Britain (toward the northeastern part of the country, if you're looking at a map). Check out the section for more on the town of Whitby.

The rest of the action takes place in and around London, the capital of Great Britain.In 1897, London was the center of the British Empire, which still covered a huge portion of the globe. It was one of the biggest cities in the world. Its crowded, maze-like streets inspired a lot of writers at the time (check out, for example).

The city was both an awe-inspiring place (as the capital city of the largest empire of the world) and also a place of potential danger—after all, if the city is so crowded that you don't know your neighbors, who knows who might be living in the tiny apartment upstairs?It could be a mass murderer, like Jack the Ripper (who terrorized London in late 1888). Who knows who could have purchased the creepy old estate next door? It could be a vampire! How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.This isn't an 'epigraph,' per se, but it still prefaces the text.

So we'd be bad little lit nerds if we let this slip through our clutches.The novel Dracula is composed of a series of first-person journals, letters, and statements, which means there are a bunch of narrators and multiple points of view are represented. Stoker's prefatory statement (the thing above) explains this and insists that the only 'editing' that has been done is to cross out anything that isn't relevant to the story. All the journals and letters, otherwise, are exactly as they were originally written.Whoa, is this true?! Not at all.Obviously, the reader realizes that the entire book is a fictional composition of Stoker's imagination. But this little prefatory remark is there to give us a sense that we're reading non-fiction—that these are legitimate manuscripts, and that we are going to read them and judge for ourselves. Stoker got the idea, both for the style of composing a novel in the form of multiple first-person narratives and for including a prefatory statement like this, from an earlier British novelist, Wilkie Collins, who pioneered the style in his popular novels, like The Woman in White and The Moonstone.What do you think of the prefatory remark?

Even though you know it's fiction, does Stoker's claim that the manuscripts are legit change the way you approach the novel? (3) Base CampDracula is an action-packed story about vampires and how to kill them without being bitten. Because it's told from multiple points of view through a collection of diary entries, letters, and notes, there's not a lot of dead space (no pun intended). The story moves along at a pretty good clip, so there's never time to be bored. The language is occasionally difficult just because it was written over a century ago, and there are some obscure historical and cultural references that might trip up the unwary modern reader, but that's where Shmoop can help. Writing Style. Immediate, StraightforwardDracula is composed as a collection of journal entries, letters, telegrams, and memos.

The idea, Stoker tells us in the note at the beginning of the novel, is to present the events of the story 'as simple fact,' even though some of the events are (to put it mildly) hard to believe. The collection of documents is like a stack of evidence being presented at court.That's right—as the reader, you get to act as judge and jury. The writing style is straightforward and very immediate: The characters write in their journals practically as events are happening, so we experience the events almost as the characters do.Check it out:I began to look at some of the books around me.

One was an atlas, which I found opened naturally at England, as if that map had been much used. (2.50)Yup: That is a boring account of a man looking at a book. We get dull details. But we also get some thrilling ones:In a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips:—'Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! (12.70-71)Even though that's a secondhand account, we get a full, immediate description—'dull and hard' eyes and 'soft voluptuous' voice. (Anyone else picking up on some sexy/demonic gender role destruction there?)In any case, we get chilling accounts of Dracula lizard-climbing up the walls of his castle.

But we also have to hear about logistics. Logistics. Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory. BloodThis one is practically a no-brainer – of course blood is important in a vampire book. But what, exactly, do all the references to blood mean? Renfield is the only character to really explain it, and he does so in fairly reasonable tones to Mina:'I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood – relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, 'For the blood is the life.'

' (18.16)So, according to Renfield, anyway, to consume someone else's blood is to consume some vital part of his or her life. If you consume enough of their blood, you gain their 'vital powers' (and, obviously, they die).Of course, we have to take Renfield's explanation with a grain of salt, since after all, he's locked up in an insane asylum for a reason. But his explanation does make a certain amount of sense, when you compare it to what Dracula is up to – he appears to have gotten younger after moving to England and feeding on Lucy. She becomes weaker as he becomes stronger. Perhaps Renfield is right – maybe in the world of Dracula, consuming someone else's blood really does allow you to 'assimilate' some of their 'vital powers.' Communion and the Sacred WaferAs long as we're talking about drinking blood, we should pause to think about the Christian ritual of Holy Communion (a.k.a. The Lord's Supper or Holy Eucharist).

Holy Communion is a kind of reenactment of Jesus' last meal with his disciples the night before he was crucified. He ate some bread and had some wine, shared it with his friends, and told them that the bread represented his body and that the wine represented his blood (he knew he was about to die).

He also instructed them to remember him whenever they had wine and bread. Christians of almost every sect perform some version of Communion, eating bread or wafers and drinking wine. However, one of the main differences between Catholic Communion and most Protestant Communion is the Roman Catholic belief that, during the rite of Communion, the bread and wine consumed actually change to become the body and blood of Jesus. (This is called 'transubstantiation,' for the 'changing' 'trans' of substance.)So when Van Helsing shows up with 'Sacred Wafers,' what he has are Communion wafers (bread) that have already been blessed by a priest. And since Van Helsing is Roman Catholic, he believes in transubstantiation – that the wafers only look like wafers, but are actually the body of Jesus. That's about as holy as you can get in the Christian tradition.Why is this important in Dracula, you ask?

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Well, at its most basic level you could view the Christian rite of Communion as being about gaining strength from consuming someone else's blood. Is vampirism a twisted version of the most sacred of Christian rituals? That makes vampirism pretty darn unholy. And maybe that's why the Sacred Wafer that Van Helsing brings is so effective as a vampire repellant. The Sacred Wafer and vampires are like opposite ends of a magnet – they simply can't touch, according to a fundamental physical (or spiritual) law.

Dracula's Move to EnglandAt the time Bram Stoker was writing Dracula (1897), Great Britain's world-wide empire was starting to crumble. Other countries, like Germany and the US, were starting to gain power both economically and politically.

A lot of British people were worried that Britain would lose its status as the greatest world power. That's why some literary critics, like Stephen Arata, have argued that Dracula's move to Britain reflects British people's worry that foreigners (especially from the east) would invade Britain.

If Britain really was becoming weaker, as people feared, maybe foreigners – even people from countries that Britain had formerly colonized – would come and take over. For more on this interpretation of Dracula, check out Stephen Arata's article, 'The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization' (there's a link to it in our 'Best of the Web' section). Windows and DoorsIf Dracula's immigration to Britain can be read as an allegory about foreigners invading England, it seems reasonable that border-crossing in general will be important in Dracula. Individual homes are like mini countries for Dracula to invade, so Stoker spends a lot of time describing Dracula's entrance into various homes. The vampire is unable to enter a house where he hasn't been invited, which is why he spends so much time in the form of a bat hovering around Lucy's window, and why he entices her outside while she's sleepwalking so that he can drink her blood there. It isn't until he's gotten a wolf from the zoo to break through her window that he's able to enter her home and drink her blood in the comfort of her own bedroom.

Sleep and SleepwalkingIn the world of Dracula, if you don't want to have your blood sucked, you better down a lot of Red Bull, because being asleep tends to get you bitten. When Jonathan Harker is staying at Castle Dracula, the Count warns Jonathan not to fall asleep in any room but his bedroom.

When Jonathan falls asleep in another room of the castle, he almost gets bitten by the Brides of Dracula. Lucy is an easy target because she sleepwalks: once she's asleep, Dracula can influence her more easily and make her walk out of the house, where he can suck her blood.Why are half-asleep people more easy targets? Well, obviously, sleeping people are less able to defend themselves physically. But their guard is down in other ways, as well. The novel suggests that almost everyone (even Mina and Van Helsing) have some kind of secret, deep-rooted desire to be bitten – they just keep it repressed most of the time. But when they are half asleep, or sleepwalking, the desire bubbles to the surface. When asleep, their conscious minds aren't able to keep that naughty desire under wraps.

Maternity and MotherhoodThe only real mother we meet in this novel is Mrs. Westenra, Lucy's mother, and she dies pretty quickly.

Mina takes over as everyone's mother, and boy is she good at it: not five minutes after she meets Arthur Holmwood, she has him crying on her shoulder like a baby:We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked; I felt this big, sorrowing man's head resting on me, as though it were that of the baby that some day may lie on my bosom, and I stroked his hair as though he were my own child. (17.58-59)Motherhood sounds almost holy here: it's an instinct, or a 'spirit' that can be 'invoked' and that helps women 'rise above' everyday stuff. Contrast the passage about Mina, above, with this description of vampire Lucy:With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. (16.19)If vampirism and blood-sucking can be read as a twisted version of Holy Communion, female vampires can be read as twisted, diabolical mothers. Instead of saint-like mothers, they get all voluptuous and scarily sexy. Instead of nurturing children against their breasts, they feed on children and chuck them on the ground.

Technology and SuperstitionBram Stoker, as you've probably noticed, is totally obsessed with trains. In the world of Dracula, trains are representative of Stoker's wider interest in the latest, most up-to-date technology. It's hard for modern readers to remember, but all the technologies mentioned in Dracula – Seward's phonograph, the telegrams, the trains, the blood transfusions, Mina's typewriter and even her shorthand – were super high-tech in 1897. If Stoker were writing today, the technologies would obviously be different.

Instead of recording his journal entries on a phonograph (an early recording device), Dr. Seward would blog about his patients. Instead of sending a telegraph to warn the men that Dracula was on the move, Mina would whip out her iPhone and send a text.Why does Stoker include all these details to show how up-to-date and high-tech his characters are? Well, one effect is to create a contrast between the science and technology Van Helsing and his crew have on their side with the tradition and superstition governing the world of Dracula.But even though the good guys in Dracula are able to use technology to their advantage in many cases, it has its limits: the blood transfusions don't save Lucy's life, and a blip in the telegraph system keeps Seward from getting Van Helsing's message in time rush to Lucy's aid.

Technology and science, it seems, don't have all the answers. In fact, Van Helsing, Seward, and the others actually have to get over their faith in science, logic, and modern technology in order to defeat Dracula.

They have to accept, first of all, that vampires exist, and they have to re-educate themselves, learning ancient traditions and superstitions, to figure out how to kill a vampire. The Winchester rifles that Quincey Morris brings are great against the Szgany in the final fight scene, but killing Dracula requires something more primitive – a big knife and a stake through the heart. Modernity and HistoryAnother effect of all the science and technology in Dracula is to create a contrast between modernity and history. Dracula is, after all, centuries old. He lives in a crumbling old medieval castle, and the surrounding countryside is filled with superstitions and traditions. Jonathan Harker describes his travel from Britain to Transylvania as being like a trip back in time, and that transition is represented by (surprise, surprise) the punctuality of the trains.

The further he gets from Great Britain, the center of modern civilization (in Harker's opinion), the less reliable the trains are. So Dracula could be read as representing history or the past, and Great Britain as representing the present. If that's the case, maybe Dracula's 'invasion' of Britain is meant to remind us of the way history has of influencing or haunting the present. First Person (Multiple Central Narrators)Bram Stoker clearly lived by the ethos of 'the more the merrier.' There are definitely more narrators in this bad boy than in your average novel.The novel is composed of a series of journal entries, letters, newspaper articles, and memos. Bram Stoker explains the rationale for this structure in a brief note before Chapter 1 (See for more on that).In order to make the story seem realistic, Stoker presents the novel as a series of supposedly 'real' documents—the reader is given just the facts of the case, written out by the people who experienced the events directly.

This narrative technique puts the reader in the position of a judge or jury (or both): We hear the evidence of a variety of different eyewitnesses, and we're supposed to interpret the it as best we can. Given that it's totally otherworldly and terrifying.We're not given a central third-person omniscient narrator who can tell us what to think about the events.

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Another effect of this technique is that we hear about the same events from multiple perspectives—we have access to multiple points of view, so there isn't just one character we sympathize with. We pretty much like 'em all. Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis: Overcoming the Monster. Anticipation Stage and 'Call' Dracula Moves to England from TransylvaniaJonathan Harker gradually realizes that the Transylvanian count he's helping to purchase a house in England is actually a vampire. And intends to feed on the English populace. Harker wants to stop him, but succeeds only in escaping alive from Castle Dracula. Dream Stage Mina and Lucy Hang Out in WhitbyThis isn't much of a dream stage.

Mina is worried about Jonathan's long absence and the lack of letters. Lucy is giddy with excitement about her engagement to Arthur. Mina becomes increasingly worried about Lucy's habit of sleepwalking, which seems to be getting worse.Lucy seems to be getting weaker, and they don't know why. The men try to save her by giving her blood transfusions, but it doesn't work: She dies. Only Van Helsing realizes that Dracula is behind it. Frustration Stage Lucy Becomes a VampireAfter Lucy's funeral, Van Helsing explains to the other men what has happened: Dracula has turned Lucy into a vampire.

The only way to stop her from preying on the children of England and to give her peace is to put a stake through her heart and to cut off her head. The men aren't happy about it, but they agree to the plan. They kill Lucy and want to destroy Dracula himself. But how to go about it?

Nightmare Stage Dracula Attacks MinaAs the men work on tracking down the vampire, Dracula has slipped in under their noses to drink Mina's blood. If they don't kill Dracula quickly, Mina will turn into a vampire like Lucy. But when they all seem to have lost hope, they figure out where Dracula is headed, and race to cut him off The Thrilling Escape from Death, and Death of the Monster The Chase Scene Through Transylvania and the Death of DraculaMina and the men track Dracula back to Transylvania and finally catch up with him almost at the front door of Castle Dracula. They kill him, and Mina is saved. Plot Analysis. Literary and Philosophical References.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ' (7.1).: 'The blood is the life' (11.54). Lord Byron, (15.1). William Shakespeare,: 'That way madness lies,' Act 2, Scene 4, Line 21 (17.43)Historical and Geographical References. is a town in northern Romania.

(1.1). The is a famous museum in London that houses treasures from around the world. It also has a famous reading room where anyone can go to study. (1.2). Jack Sheppard was a housebreaker in the early 18th century who became a folk hero because of his many spectacular escapes from prison. (8.39).

Stoker associates racial stereotypes with the Adelphi Theatre, a London theater that was a rival of the, where he worked as a business manager.

Gamers With Jobs posted:In my extensive history with JRPGs I can safely say I have never experienced anything like this. Space Funeral is an absurd, completely nonsensical JRPG. With completely nonsensical story, art, and music while mechanics still strictly adhere to JRPG cliches, this game seems to make no sense. But in a way it still does.This game sounds crazy.

Why are you doing this?I love this game, and I feel it deserves a fair bit more recognition.So without further ado, Let's Play Space Funeral.Table of Contents.