Count Dracula = Vlad III
It drives me crazy every Dracula reader who makes claims they are not the same person when the text itself says so:
8 May Jonathan writes:
Midnight.—I have had a long talk with the Count. I asked him a few questions on Transylvania history, and he warmed up to the subject wonderfully. In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said “we,” and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking.
8 May Dracula says:
Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph! They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it?
30 September Van Helsing says:
He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land.
I've read literary articles by people who seem to take Dracula at his face-value word as if they are more oblivious than Jonathan Harker and write like "Well he said he was just speaking as if he was proud of his ancestors that's all. He must be some descendant of Vlad III, because clearly he cannot be the same man because that is impossible." ignoring that:
Dracula was not a family name It means 'Son of Dracul', and his father was called 'Vlad Dracul' not because it was a last/family name but because he was in the Order of the Dragon. Dracul = Dragon.
Dracula IS A VAMPIRE. HE IS IMMORTAL. He CAN be that same man, because he does not die!
