Life Of Pi Dialectical Journal

First, there is an essential need for "physical survival" as he must keep his body alive(Sparknotes). The most basic needs being food and water. He knows how to protect himself from imminent danger such as Richard Parker. As well as other threats that come when being stranded at sea such as dehydration,sharks, and drowning. Pi's creativity to build an adjoining raft to keep a safe distance from aggressive dangers such as sharks and the tiger enable him to sustain physical safety. Secondly, Pi's necessity for "spiritual survival"(Sparksnotes). Pi must keep his hopes up and not yield to hopelessness. He says that Richard Parker kept him sane in the presence of a companion. Pi's mental toughness for taming the tiger prevented him from thinking about his deserted future. from a shipwreck. Lastly Pi has Biological survival as he is the sole member of the Patel family. He would have a desire to live a long and healthy life, raise a family and pass his genes on to the next generation. He is able to survive for 227 days at sea. As he inherited powerful swimming ability from his Uncle Mamaji. At the end of the novel, the readers learn that Pi is a father,"So his story does have a happy ending"(Martel). Ultimately,Pi's willingness to survive shows his character as an

This setting is the cause of Pi’s development of primitive instincts because it is associated with chaos and a battle with the environment. The lifeboat is floating in a barren body of water that has a lonely atmosphere, which helps portray Pi’s need to be independent. To tame the survival instincts inside of him, Pi needs to rely on his own decisions and logic. Because Richard Parker’s territory is within the lifeboat, the lifeboat represents the origin of Pi’s savagery; therefore, it’s atmosphere is tense and overpowering. The action of the passage occurs in the lifeboat because Pi needs to tame his inner tiger in the same setting where it was born. Pi discusses that he spends more time in the lifeboat after his confrontation with his brute behaviour. The raft allowed Pi to hide from his developing instincts, but now that he has tamed his savagery, he can live along side it in the

“Without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story.” The significance of this quote is that the presence of Richard saves him from the effects of loneliness. “The lower you are, the higher your mind will soar.” This quote is important because when Pi is at his lowest point, he reaches for his only remaining sources of salvation, which is his faith and imagination. “Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The element couldn’t be more simple, or the stake higher.” The quote significance is that the few that survive the ship are force to face each other in a strategic battle of wits to see who will

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 is a foreshadowing device in Piscine’s name because the pool that he was named after was “as big as small oceans” (19) and he survives later on in the Pacific Ocean which is the largest ocean on planet Earth. Everything that he was taught as a little boy, all of the lessons on swimming made sense because it was all useful in the survival. Pi was the only one who knew how to swim in his family and it seemed like faith that he only survived the big storm. Patel’s nickname ‘Pi’ relates to the novel as the theme was religion, it hit the aspects. The reader can understand Pi’s

In the first chapter of part two, Pi describes the horrifying task of pulling Richard Parker into the lifeboat with a lifebuoy. Now, Pi is describing the cook hauling him in. Orange Juice floats to the lifeboat on a bed of bananas, as does Pi’s mother. The zebra and the sailor both have attained a broken leg from jumping into the lifeboat, and finally, the hyena and the cook are both described as maniacal, and both eat the mass of flies.

Pis motivations to help the man figure out what happened to the boat, causes him to tell the story of what he went though this time with people instead of animals. Pi spins the tale of the cook, the sailor, his mother and Himself, how they were left in the lifeboat and their interaction between them, until Pi is the only one left alive. These two stories are left to the reader to decide for himself which tale they prefer. Yann Martel shows that although Pi believes, in his heart, that the story with Richard Parker is what really happened, but wants to know what happened to the boat and why his family died, was willing to tell a tale that completely disregarded the story of Richard Parker. This shows the dedication Pi has to his

1. Reason One of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel was the way Pi presents his point of view in his telling of the story. In the earlier stages of the book Pi tells us of his discovery of religion which he turns to for hope later on when the cargo ship him and his family travel on sinks, leaving him orphaned and lost. Throughout the novel he retells the story of his survival with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker and the situation of their survival.

When he was traveling overseas with his parents and others, the ship sunk and everyone on board died, besides Pi, he managed to survive. He was upset his parents died, just like in the movie Hamlet, they were both upset, but they both did what they had done. He was a nice guy, but in reality, he was scared and nervous to be on an ocean just by himself, and animals. He had to try to survive on his own till he could find somewhere to stay or find land. So until then he was hungry and ends up being sad at the end because the tiger he spent his journey with went into the forest and never came back, he tried to be strong about the all the situations and made them all into a story and told the guys in Mexico about the

He starts out with a zebra, hyena, an orangutan, and a tiger, but the animals slowly diminish leaving only Pi and Richard Parker. Pi works to tame and care for Richard Parker, and the two survive for two hundred twenty-seven days. Pi encounters a fellow French castaway who is eaten by Richard Parker (Martel 311-320). Pi also comes across a man-eating island (Martel 322-358). The events that take place are fairly far-fetched, and the probability of all of them occurring to the same person in the period of time given is even less believable. The second story, on the other hand, is a perhaps more believable retelling of the original story. Pi relates the second tale upon the request of his interviewers for “‘a story without animals’” (Martel 381). In this story the animals are replaced with human representatives including an injured Chinese sailor, a French cook, Pi’s mother, and Pi himself. The second story, like the first, begins with many passengers on the boat, but in the end it leaves only Pi to survive by himself after brutally murdering and eating the cook who killed both the sailor and Pi’s own mother (Martel 381-391). Unlike Pi’s first story, this account is dark, desperate, and harshly realistic, without any sense of hope to counter it all. After relating both of these stories to his interviewers, Pi asks them which story they think is better (Martel 398). Although the

What difference is seen between Pi and the animals at the end of this chapter?

Pi’s voyage causes him to become an archetypal hero because the traumatic event of the ship sinking and his situation changes his life forever. When Pi has come to the realization that the ship sank, he understands that “[i]t made a sound like a monstous metallike burp. Things bubbled at the surface then vanished. Everything was screaming: The

Most would assume that floating through the Pacific Ocean is not as bad as it sounds but floating across the Pacific with a Bengal Tiger is a completely different story. Pi must battle all the elements, and the Bengal Tiger, Richard Parker, to make it safely back to land. In the text “Life of Pi,” Yann Martel employs several literary devices, including theme, throughout the text to connect to the reader and keep them interested. Martel introduces many themes into the story through Pi and his lessons learned. In order to support the theme Martel introduces symbolism into the text.

Like all story’s each has an ending to it, but in Life of Pi, the investigators of the sunken ship, wanted straight facts, instead of any storytelling that would make them look like fools. Pi’s questioning of the officers led to his question “tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?”(Martel, 311) Pi’s question, about which story was real was never answered, due to the ambiguity of his storytelling. Pi’s storytelling of his journey, lacked a final resolution, as it is left open for the reader to pick which story was better, regardless of which one is the actual

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’’.