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Life Of Pi Animal Analysis

Decent Essays

Life of Pi, written by Yann Martel, a beast fable written for adults, which has successfully portrayed animals with human feelings and motives. The fable is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel many years after the sinking of a cargo ship with his family on his way from India to Canada. A period of 227 days oversea of Pi in a lifeboat, in company of a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra and a Royal Bengal tiger. It is a storytelling literary fiction created by using anthropomorphism and animal imagery. Throughout Martel’s presentation in the book, each of the animals represented different characters of various traits, individually impacting Pi’s journey.
The Bengal tiger, also known as Richard Parker, represented the animal instincts and …show more content…

Finally, when the lifeboat reached the island of Mexico, the “savage Pi” is gone forever with Richard. Richard Parker’s savagery influenced Pi for his guilty acts, however, he was the motive and spirit that encouraged Pi to stay alive before being rescued.
The hyena expresses the evil and the wrong things in the world, considering its characteristics, hyena was parallel to the cook. Pi described the hyena in negative terms, such as the hyena’s “coarse coat seems to have been patched together from the leftovers of creations” (Martel, 128), and the colour of hyena looked “liked the symptoms of a skin disease” (Martel, 128). Not only Pi wanted the readers the readers to see how unpleasing a hyena looks, it also foreshadows its vicious actions. Both the hyena and the cook were selfish, as the hyena killed the zebra and orangutan for its own good, similarly, the cook’s savagery on the Taiwanese sailor for his own benefits. The second story was a lot harder for a reader to accept comparing the cook’s actions to hyena’s killing. The hyena was included in the story to contrast Pi’s divine and justice, because nobody can tolerate evil. That being said, Pi killed the cook for his revenge, and Richard Parker killed the hyena.
Orange Juice, the orangutan, who was very protective was to be known as the Pi’s Mother, Gita, in its parallel story. “It was Orange Juice,... mother of two fine boys” (Martel, 123). The

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