Life Of Pi Diction Essay

Throughout his young life, Pi has been guided by a strong set of morals and values. A strict pacifist and vegetarian, Pi never dreamed of killing an animal, especially for food. Pi states, “…When I was a child I always shuddered when I snapped open a banana because it sounded to me like the breaking of an animal’s neck” (Martel 197). However, faced with starvation at sea, Pi must decide between adhering to his morals and satisfying his ravenous hunger when a school of flying fish descends upon the lifeboat. He chooses his own survival and decides he must butcher a fish to feed himself. Martel uses vivid details and language to convey Pi’s feelings about the necessity of violence and killing a living creature for survival. Martel conveys a sense of suspense to the reader as Pi raises his hatchet several times to

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,

B. This quote shows that Pi is traumatized when he hears Richard Parker eating a human. It also shows that when this happened something in his spirit disappeared. A. “Tree took account of road, which was aware of air, which was mindful of sea, which shared things with sun. Every element lived in harmonious relation with its neighbor, and all was kith and kin.”

One of the most pervasive themes in this passage is that of a spreading decay that is taking over the society. This is first expressed in quite a literal sense, as an actual decay of fruit and produce, which spreads like a virus across the American countryside and farming lands. Due to the economic mismanagement of the farming industry, fruit and other produce are left to rot and decay on the trees because they are not picked by the farmers. The text gives many examples of different fruits being left to decay on the farms. We see, for example, the cherries, that are described at first as “full and sweet”, being left to turn into seeds which “drop and dry with black shreds hanging from them”. The purple prunes, which now “carpet the

Karanvir Dhami Ms. Yu ENG3U March 7, 2011 Symbolism in Life of Pi In Life of Pi there are many literary devices used to present the different themes in the novel. The main literary device used in Life of Pi is symbolism. Symbolism is often used to represent an object to something else, either by association or by resemblance. Most of the names of animals, objects and even humans in this novel have a symbolic meaning. In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, symbolism such as pi’s name, the colour orange and the algae island, are used throughout the novel to provide Pi with protection to help him either survive or overcome his emotional pain. The mathematical pi is undefined, infinite and unable to be understood, just like Piscine Patel.

“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

As he stood before the various pies at the grocery store, he began to drool and sweat not just because of the looks of the pie, but the feeling of guilt that he retrieves. He describes his “wet, finger-dripping pieces” after eating the pie and claims it to be the best thing he has ever tasted. The description of his sticky fingers, helps the reader to comprehend the feeling of him digging his fingers into the pie and fulfilling himself. His teeth covered in the jam-like filling describing the way he devoured the pie and the taste of it. But after he finished the pie, he remembers the grocer’s forehead and recalls that feeling of guilt from earlier.

What happens when an Individual seeks union with divinity Where the protagonist Piscine Molitor Patel “Pi” is visited by the most extraordinary dreams, trances, visions, thoughts, sensations, and remembrances. In this 2012 American survival drama film Life Of Pi written by David Magee and directed by Ang Lee, Pi is

Being a castaway on the verge of death, the carnivorous algae island became a crucial element in Pi’s survival. It offered Pi a sense of not only hope, but salvation. In many ways, the island shows a parallel to the Garden of Eden. It is a sacred garden created by God for Adam and Eve, who lived on his plants as a source of food. With the animals that lived alongside them, the Garden of Eden was truly a paradise, a place of peace and happiness. However, this did not last long. After being tricked by a snake to steal the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, they were banished to Earth. Adam and Eve, once so pure, lost their innocence as they became tainted with knowledge, of both evil and good.

Isolation plays a significant role in Pi's story, and both Martel and Lee have their differences in conveying this theme. Martel does not write Pi's journey in chronological order. Despite this, the author manages to effectively express the protagonist's emotions to the audience. Throughout the first chapter, the reader learns about Pondicherry Zoo, which was ran by his father and was considered his home. Martel makes Pi describe his life at the zoo, stating that "it was a paradise on earth. I have nothing but the fondest memories growing up in a zoo. I had the life of a prince," (page 14). Martel writes is past tense here, thus indicating to the reader that Pi no longer has a life at the zoo. This is soon confirmed a couple of pages later, with Pi stating that "the Pondicherry Zoo doesn't exist anymore. It's pits are filled in, the cages torn down. I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory," (page 19).

1. Firstly, part three of the novel presents the reader with a change in the form of the narrative. Up until chapter ninety-six, as we’ve seen, the novel has consisted of two types of narrative: first person from the point of view of the author, and Pi’s first-person account, which is constructed by the author. Now, the exchanges between Pi, Mr. Okamoto, and Mr. Chiba are entirely dialogue. The new form of narrative is a third-person transcription, which lacks rich detail, potential illusion, and over exaggeration. As an audience, we perceive this as solid, factual information. But, Pi is also preparing to retell another version of his survival story. We now have to decide what story—one, both, or none, is the true story.

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

Due to Pi’s devotion to all of his faiths, particularly Hinduism, not only changed how he thought about his current situation, but also changed how he would think about every single situation after in Martel’s Life of Pi.

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is a prime literary example of the major impacts the roles of minor characters have on the plot of a story. Without such characters as the protagonist’s father, uncle, and brother, the entirety of the main characters’ lives would be shifted dramatically. So much, in fact, that the events of the novel may never have occurred had these secondary characters been absent.

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’’.