I wanna be a saint

The expression “I wanna be a saint” condenses Lestat’s unresolved struggle to become good: he longs for religious recognition and the power to save souls, yet knows that neither imagining himself a saint nor performing an apparent miracle erases his responsibility for evil. Repeated as a private aspiration and in the book’s final dream, the phrase sets idealized holiness against the vampire’s expected return to hunting, and ends not with a claim of redemption but with love serving as a continuing moral demand.

The saint Lestat imagines

Lestat’s fantasy of sainthood takes institutional form when he imagines God instructing him to appear to people as a saint should. He pictures himself returning from Heaven to Earth for that purpose, and later imagines healing Pope John Paul II. The scene expresses the wish behind the phrase: not simply to be admired, but to offer spiritual and bodily help under the authority of a recognized saintly identity.

That imagined status is entangled with the Church’s actual practice of canonization. Lestat is envious of Juan Diego, whom Pope John Paul II canonizes, and dwells on the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe appearing to him in 1531. In Lestat’s account, Juan Diego’s humility, the roses gathered for the bishop, and the image of the Virgin on his tilma make the episode compelling; he also argues that the Pope’s authority and the faithful’s prayers matter even amid doubts about whether Juan Diego existed. He imagines the saint receiving petitions from people on Earth and relaying them to God. Against that public religious recognition, Lestat’s own sainthood remains an unrealized desire.

The fantasy meets the vampire

The imagined apparition cannot hold. Alone in the Sistine Chapel, Lestat wants to become a priest and consecrate the host, and insists that he does not want to do evil. But he recognizes that the canonization he has pictured never happened and that he is not even in the chapel. He is a vampire who has lived on the blood of others for more than two hundred years and understands himself as ritually impure. The gap between the saint he wants to be and the life he has lived is not solved by longing.

That conflict also shapes his response to his own actions. After transforming Mona Mayfair, Lestat feels profound contrition and concludes that his powers and talents are dark, with evil as their inevitable result. His thought of Stirling Oliver as someone who might absolve him does not provide absolution; Lestat recognizes that Stirling cannot simply remove the burden of what he has done. The saintly ideal thus measures responsibility rather than cancelling it.

A final dream, and a continuing demand

Near the end of the book, Lestat dreams that he wants to save souls by the millions, look like an angel, and be Saint Juan Diego. The dream immediately turns toward the life he expects to resume: hunting in roadside places, drinking, and confronting people he considers evil. The juxtaposition does not make those acts equivalent to sainthood. It exposes the distance between his aspiration and his habitual violence, even as the dream lets both remain present in the same unsettled self-image.

The closing passage refuses a simple resolution. Lestat calls himself a magnet for the damned, but his heart will not give up; the blood that teaches life will not teach lies, and love becomes his reprimand and goad. The repeated wish to be a saint therefore functions less as a declaration of achieved holiness than as a persistent measure of the person he has not become. His desire to save others remains in tension with his capacity to harm, while love keeps that tension morally alive.