Q # 1: Does the story have a theme? What is it? Is it implicit or explicit? Is it universal? Does it make you see things in a new or different way?

The book Dracula by Bram Stoker certainly does have a theme, and the one I recognized was the importance of superstition in relation to science. This is evident throughout the book as the group is slowly forced to realize that Lucy Westenra has been bitten by a vampire. Only Dr. Van Helsing is willing to recognize this idea because he boasts an exceedingly open mind, but the rest of the group is very wary of this concept. For example, Jonathan Harker, who lived in Dracula's castle for over a month and saw horrifying things there, was unable to accept or believe what he saw simply because he lived an extremely rational life, and was led to regard monsters such as vampires as superstitious nonsense. This led him to think himself mad and develop brain fever. Similar to this was Dr. John Seward, who also refused to believe that his patient could be a vampire, until he witnessed her as an undead himself. These two examples clearly illustrate the theme, which certainly does make me see things in a different way. Perhaps phenomena that people claim to witness every day, such as ghosts, are yet to be explained by science, though disregarded by the general population in much the same way as the characters in the book naturally disregarded vampires as not being real. This theme is implicit, because I extrapolated it from the book, which does not say this theme directly.