Life Of Pi By Yann Martel Essay

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.

Martel uses Richard Parker’s physical qualities and actions to symbolize the savagery Pi converted to in the beginning of his struggle. During his long journey Pi has no option but to dehumanize himself for survival. In the story with humans Pi is forced to kill the cynical frenchman because he killed his mother; despite this, Martel still depicts Pi as a murderer. His primitive actions are why Martel chooses to create another story and depict him as an animal, a tiger. For a human to kill another human is extremely

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

Bengali polymath, Rabindranath Tagore, once said “you can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” In the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel, the protagonist, Pi, faces many challenges at sea while being accompanied by a tiger by the name of Richard Parker. This tiger, though a nuisance, proves to be essential in the role of Pi’s survival. Throughout the story, Richard Parker symbolizes survival, a reflection of Pi, and a being of God.

There are many instances in Pi’s story in which symbolism plays an important role in communicating meaning to readers. At the end of the novel, Pi reveals to Japanese investigators a story that details his journey of survival that replaces the animals with humans. In this retold story, Richard Parker is replaced by Pi. The idea of Pi and Richard Parker being one and the same indicates that a part of Richard Parker is present in Pi’s true character. Pi makes this comment on fear: “It is a clever, treacherous adversary...It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy” (Martel 161). This description of fear sounds an awful lot like how one could describe a feral tiger. Richard Parker, then, is symbolic of Pi’s fear and of how he is able to eventually control it. Another example of symbolism is the lifeboat. The lifeboat, his salvation from the perils of sea, is symbolic of his faith in God. He clings to the lifeboat when he is in need just as he clings to God in his time of dire need. The boat, and therefore his faith, is what eventually carries him to safety. Richard Parker and the lifeboat are examples of symbolism that reveal hidden aspects of Pi’s true

Storytelling, in many ways, allows one to express their imagination through fanciful adventures and tales; thus, serving a purpose in terms of allowing an individual to cope with their tragedies, but also to entertain one another. In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and in Tim Burton’s Big Fish, the audience comes to realize that the conflict between fact and truth, combined with storytelling, are the central themes; it becomes clearer that facts have to be proven, whereas the truth is usually straightforward. These stories focus around the protagonists’ views, teaching the value, truth, and purpose of storytelling; in which, it is the pieces that collectively form the importance of storytelling. Storytelling allows the protagonists of both stories to cope with their struggles, and assists them in overcoming their adversities. It partly influences their decisions, and ideas; ultimately, changing their own perspectives in their struggles. Both show that stories can be incredibly meaningful and take on significant roles for the characters, which can be used to answer important questions about the truth.

These responses bring up intriguing questions: what is truth? How shall we know what truth is? Even within the reader, added perspectives bring greater understanding of the truth. The audience’s ordinary and cognitive senses make the text meaningful. The thematic view illustrates how the text centers meaning around it, using itself. The perspective of this little world’s creator intentionally transcends the text’s basic meaning, showing the reader how this web of stories has shaped the author and his views on literature. These views reveal what the author was working towards in his text and how he was trying to make the reader think. All four of these complete perspectives are themselves incomplete perspectives on truth. Truth is not barren and flat like plain dry facts. It is full and dimensional, a model that it would be a shame to only show one side of. To grasp the true sense of the model (for do not misunderstand, the model itself is solid and does not change), one of must walk around it and see it in all lights. Authorial, thematic, cognitive, and ordinary – all see it from these differing sides. They speak to each from opposite sides of the model, bringing together a better and more complete

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

When writing, authors need to think of their audience and involve an element of surprise. Authors use plot twists in their writing to help them accomplish surprising the audience, allowing them to keep their audience’s interest. Not only do plot twists help keep the audience’s attention, they also make the audience question their beliefs about what they think of the story. Authors can use this tool to advance their themes. Yann Martel uses a crazy plot twist in his book, the Life of Pi, to suggest to readers that truth is relative.

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe are both novels about hard work and determination paying off. In both novels, they both start off with saying how the main characters have struggled throughout their lives, up to the point where they decide to make a change. The authors both offer the reader a different point of view on this topic, however they can relate.

In science, a common theme is that every action has a reaction. When baking powder is mixed with vinegar, the two react together to create something new. This is cause and effect. In cause and effect, each event has cause for why it happened, and its subsequent effects. The event was the chemicals being mixed, caused by are curiosity, leading to a new substance.

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is an account of a boy, a tiger, and the vast Pacific Ocean. After Pi’s family sold their zoo in India, they moved to Canada, they sailed there with a few remaining animals. Until tragedy strikes when a terrible storm sinking the ship, leaving Pi with 4 animals one of them being Royal bengal tiger. Pi was the only human that survived, stuck on a lifeboat together with the tiger. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, Pi and the tiger eventually learned to trust each other.

Organization is essential in any good book, as in The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The way Yann Martel sets up part one in his book, The Life of Pi, is very different from most authors styles. Part one of The Life of Pi mainly consists of Pi’s childhood, with the exception of the observations of Pi made by the author of Pi’s story. It is inferred Pi has had some struggle in between his transition from India to Canada as Martel starts the book off with Pi stating, “[his] suffering left [him] sad and gloomy” (Martel, 4). Pi grew up in a zoo that was filled with adventure and exotic organisms.

The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities that interrogate Pi refuse to believe his