Renfield wishes to gain the special knowledge of undeadness from Dracula, but is eventually killed by his would-be master. Renfield is obsessed with the life-giving energies of the animals he eats-flies, spider, birds, cats-and these animals must die to give him life. Both Harker and Van Helsing appear to go gray and age as the book progresses-they near death, physically, as they endanger their lives, and only once Dracula is fully killed do they regain their total health. Lucy's sleepwalking, too, is an "in-between state," not waking and not sleeping, which allows Dracula to find her, bite her, and eventually make her a vampire. This "in-between" hypnotic state is a kind of undeadness. Mina, then, is hypnotized by Van Helsing, later on, to provide information on Dracula's whereabouts. Harker's swoon, upon leaving Dracula's castle, nearly kills him, and he spends many months regaining his full health, only to find that Mina has been afflicted by Dracula's bite. Other characters in the novel hover between these categories of living and dying. In this sense, to kill Dracula is to allow him to live-to free his soul from the prison of his body. He sleeps during the day and lives at night he is of incredible strength when awake, but must be invited into one's room in order to begin his "seduction." But the touchstone of Dracula's undeadness is his inability actually to die-his soul is trapped in a kind of prison, and must be released by the cutting off of Dracula's head, or the driving of a wooden stake through his heart. All the above lead into the final, and perhaps most important, theme of the novel: that of the relationship between life, death, and the state in between these two, known by Van Helsing as "undeadness." Dracula is a creature of the undead.
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