Fear In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi

The Life of Pi, an award-winning novel by Yann Martel, tells the story of Pi Patel, a young boy stranded at sea with an adult Bengal tiger. Marooned on a tiny lifeboat adrift in the Pacific Ocean, Pi finds himself struggling to survive. Faced with imminent suffering and death brought on by hunger, thirst, and an unending battle with the elements, Pi must make a decision between upholding his and society’s strict set of morals and values, or letting his survival instincts take over. Through compelling language and imagery, Martel gives Pi’s conflict between morals, fear, and survival a sense of excitement, suspense, and climax.

In Life of Pi, author Yann Martel utilizes metaphors to foreshadow future events and to reveal new insight about Pi’s character and the theme. When Pi is a young boy, his father teaches him and his brother why they should never put their hands in the animals’ cages. Pi’s father decides to teach them this valuable lesson by forcing his sons to watch a hungry tiger devour a vulnerable goat. Pi says, “I don’t know if I saw blood… or if i daubed it on later, in my memory, with a big brush” (39). As Pi tells two stories of the same event, it foreshadows the ending of the book where Pi tells news reporters two stories of his survival out at sea. This reveals that Pi is very creative and imaginative,

When Pi gets stranded on the boat with the animals, this quakes his perfect reality from events going as planned to what he should do in order to stay alive.” He then had to accept the death of his parents and also his brother. pi being so haunted by the thoughts of Mortality, brought him to create mental blocks in order to eat raw meats and raw fish. The biggest obsticle he had to face was learning how to tame a Bengal tiger with no experience. “ I had to tame him. It was at that very moment i realized this necessity.” This quote conveys pi’s logical thoughts to his survival thoughts. This quote also gives pi the

Most people don’t have to suffer trauma in a lifeboat all by themselves. Further, most people don’t have to retell their story years after with accuracy. That is exactly what Pi has to do in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. There are many challenges that Pi goes through that Pi goes through that could make him an unreliable narrator including a lack of written records, trauma, loneliness, and the effects dehydration and malnutrition has in a person. Furthermore, by considering Pi’s unreliability the reader comes to understand that the truth of his story remains irrefutable and therefore the truth is more important than the facts. Pi could be assumed by the reader to be an unreliable narrator through a lack of written record of his experiences from the past, his trauma and loneliness at sea, and the mental effects of dehydration, malnutrition and hallucinations.

Within the text of, Life of Pi, the narrator, Pi had always been drawn towards the tiger, Richard Parker, throughout his entire childhood, even during hardships. Were Pi’s life was in danger. This can be evident when Pi talks about the importance of the tiger, “ Richard Parker has stayed with me. I’ve never forgotten him. Dare say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.” (Y.Martel pg 14). This quotation proves that Pi considers Richard Parker to be part of his family, side from all the loss and grief Pi has experienced throughout his journey, even though he is a tiger. Unlike, Life of Pi, the poem illustrates tigers though dark and negative light and pursue these creatures as evil figures that are the result of the higher power. This idea can be pictured through the focal point of the poem, through the use of sensationalism.” What dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp?” (Blake, Tiger). Though the use of this persuasive technique, the poet, continuously raises questions to the higher power, as to why he could can possibly create such horror. Proving the poem to persuade the tiger as evil.

Humans generally face struggles in their lifetime. Such struggles could be within themselves or with someone or something else but commonly stem from some sort of opposition in lifestyle. In Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, Pi’s passion for personal survival conflicts with his moral obligations to himself internally, morphing his external character.

To simply be alive consists of the acts of breathing and having blood pump through the body, but to be a human being consists of much more complexity. The nature composed of a human being involves having self sovereignty on our own emotions, opinions, desires, faiths as well as having a moral subconscious. Yet, what occurs when a situation allows an individual to react in a behaviour that doesn’t follow these defining factors of human nature? In Yann Martel 's Life of Pi, he creates the conflict of a cargo ship sinking, and the only notable survivors on the life raft consists of a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, and a 16-year-old Indian boy. The protagonist of the novel, Pi Patel, is faced with a personal survival conflict

Although it is not obvious at first, the large threat of a tiger on board blends into a symbol of survival for Pi. Though Richard Parker is a large issue for Pi, he is not the only issue being faced. Issues such as lack of food, scarce drinking water, and no sense of direction also

Another important part highlighting the motivation of Pi’s fear is when he is truly aware of his fear and what is going on. Martel shows that Pi has come to terms with this fear by saying “I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always” (2.56.178) This passage shows Pi’s awareness of his fear and suffering, as well as, that he knows he must go through much more in order to survive.

In addition, Pi decides to feed a “450-pound” (Martel 61) bengal tiger named Richard Parker for his own self preservation. He acknowledges, “I had to tame him. It was at that moment that I realized this necessity…More likely the worst would happen: the simple passage of time, in which his animal toughness would easily outlast my human frailty” (Martel 164). This means that Pi fears that the fierce animal strength and power of Richard Parker would eventually kill and eat him for food.

On its surface, Martel’s Life of Pi proceeds as a far-fetched yet not completely unbelievable tale about a young Indian boy named Pi who survives after two hundred twenty-seven days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. It is an uplifting and entertaining story, with a few themes about companionship and survival sprinkled throughout. The ending, however, reveals a second story – a more realistic and dark account replacing the animals from the beginning with crude human counterparts. Suddenly, Life of Pi becomes more than an inspiring tale and transforms into a point to be made about rationality, faith, and how storytelling correlates the two. The point of the book is not for the reader to decide which

Fueled by Fear Fighting for Dominance with a bengal tiger is not how Pi Patel thought his trip to Canada was going to go. Fear is a common enemy in modern day literature because fear is one of the most animalistic impulses of humans. Yann Martel describes fear being the fuel to survival through the irony of fear being motivational and personification of fear as a person in Life of Pi. Pi is in an ironic situation when it comes to Richard Parker and his own survival.

Pi has had many fears throughout his story being stranded on a small boat with a tiger. “I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging above me” (Ch. 40 Yann Martel). Pi was very limited on resources and was caught up in a storm. He had nothing but a long stick to protect himself from the Bengal tiger. Things can’t get any worse for Pi, but he proves that he’s tough.

The saying “desperate times call for desperate measures” holds truth to an extent. In the award winning novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel, drastic measures are taken by characters in order to survive while stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. Through his journey, main character, Pi Patel, endures many hardships and witnesses several deaths. Significantly, the death of the zebra accompanying Pi and the other animals establishes a generalization of human nature being sophisticated yet inherently vicious according to methods of survival.

Furthermore, his vast knowledge of animals, having grown up at a zoo, helps him to tame Richard Parker. Pi knows tigers’ psychological thinking and exploits this by classically conditioning Richard Parker. Likewise, Pi’s experience of watching a tiger kill a goat in his early childhood taught him the fundamental lesson that ‘an animal is an animal’, enabling him to strategically and mentally survive his long and testing time at sea. In addition to that, during the early parts of Part 2, Pi comes across a survival manual, a crucial object for his continued existence. The book gives him critical information on the do’s and don’ts of survival at sea and it is hard to imagine that Pi could have survived without this book which also gave him the opportunity to write down his words which were “all he has left’’.