How Does Yann Martel Use Religion In 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.

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

Pi is an eager, outgoing, and excitable child, dependent on his family for comfort and support. In school, his few main concerns were to prevent his schoolmates from mispronouncing his name and learning as much and as fast as he can about religion and zoology. But when the ship went down Pi is torn from his family and left alone on a lifeboat with wild animals which would make anyone believe that they weren’t going to even make it through the night. The disaster gives him a reality check which makes him realize that he has to become self-sufficient. He mourns the loss of his family and fears for his life, which any normal sane person would do but he realizes that he has to take this challenge and make the best of what he can. He finds a survival guide and emergency provisions. He had to force himself to question his on values and decides that his vegetarianism is a luxury, and he wouldn’t make it a week without teaching himself how to fish. He manages to protect himself from Richard Parker the bangle tiger that has managed to get stuck on this boat with him and take on a parental relationship with the tiger, providing him with food and keeping him in line, to protect himself as well as keeping Richard Parker alive. The devastating shipwreck turns Pi into an adult, able to fend for himself out in the world alone. Which gives him good morals, and

Yann Martel manipulates the narrative style and structural devices within this passage to support the will to survive theme that is present in Life of Pi. Before the shipwreck, Pi was a spiritual individual with a strong appreciation for the joy and peace in life. Pi commonly experienced cruelty and doubt from his family and friends; however, he remained calm by following the guidance from his three religions. After the shipwreck, the spirituality within Pi’s life was tampered with because the chaotic and brute actions of the animals threatened to separate Pi from his peaceful demeanour. At first, Pi maintained his interaction with God, but as the days passed and the conditions worsened, Pi’s animal instincts began to develop.

The belief in a higher power is one of the key components in the Life of Pi and in the lives of people all over the world. This belief in a higher power or God contributes to strife including conflict between different religions, religious extremists, and the relationship between government and religion.

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).

In the rare times, we see Richard Parker throughout the novel we simultaneously see the savage side of pi. Whenever the mysterious tiger makes an appearance we often see Pi partake in something barbaric to survive. Pi Patel was never one to break the flesh of another living thing but being on the lifeboat for those unpleasant 227 days he is forced to do things that go against his own moral compass. Martel does a fantastic job of symbolizing the character of Richard Parker as the savage ways pi demonstrated to survive his ordeal. The main way we can draw this conclusion of Richard Parker representing Pi comes from the many textual examples throughout the novel. For example, as Pi gains consciousness and awareness of his surreal surroundings after the sinking of the Tsimtsum he goes straight into survival mode as Richard Parker appears. Whenever Richard Parker is hidden Pi is always in a calm and restful state, this meaning that as Pi’s need for

At the beginning of the novel, Pi’s story is described as “a story that will make you believe in God.” Writer himself Yann Martel was going thru his writers crisis, traveling world looking for a good story to write something about. Martel found a man who told his story. His man named Piscine Molitor Patel who is a practicing follower of three religions: Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. For this reason, extremely mature boy must constantly fight the lack of tolerance and understanding in his surroundings. While in the case of adult people the lack of a specific decision on the faith can be perceived as humiliating, but Pi is fully justified because of his young age. His desire is to find the road to the creator will be seriously tested during

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along’”. Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, chronicles the life of Pi Patel, a young boy who lives in Pondicherry, India. During his childhood he discovers his growing ambition towards practicing three religions, and develops a curiosity for zoology.

Isolation acts as a good method to collect thoughts and sort out complex situations. However, Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi, writes about isolation from a different perspective. Piscine Molitor Patel, a sixteen year old boy, experiences hardships which shows how easily change occurs. The book takes place on a stranded lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Pi must live with no human contact besides an adult Bengal Tiger.

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

When Yann Martel tells of Pi Patel’s life story after the shipwreck, he presents it in two distinctive ways: one being with animals, and one without. As a young boy, Pi began to develop a love of animals as a result of growing up on the lands of Pondicherry Zoo, his family zoo in India. He also finds that he has a deep passion for religion. Supposedly, Life of Pi will make one believe in God, as it did to Pi in these two stories.

At the beginning of the novel Pi finds himself stranded on the Pacific Ocean after the ship he and his family were on sank with nothing but his beliefs, a lifeboat, a survivor’s manual, and a tiger he calls Richard Parker. Throughout the novel Pi is in a constant struggle with both his humanity and what he needs to do to survive. He learns of the cruel survival instincts within himself that he never thought possible. At the beginning of the novel Pi was nothing more than a boy who only saw the good in the world and in humanity. By the end of the novel, however, he becomes a man who has had to face things that no person should ever have to face alone even if one believes in

In his interview with Jennie Renton, author Yann Martel says that the subtext of his novel Life of Pi can be summarized in three lines: life is a story, you can choose your story, and a story with God is a better story. In his novel, Martel uses the concepts of religion and fiction in a way that is almost interchangeable. Through the character and beliefs of Pi, he shares the idea that all religions contain stories and a reason for our existence, and that what makes this good is the reassurances it provides in our lives. Religions make life meaningful and gives us purpose and Martel goes on to describe a life without them as a “dry, yeast less factuality” (22).

In the Life of Pi, the main character Pi is raised in a Hindu family, but as a boy he becomes more devoutly Hindu and then also converts to Christianity and Islam. He practices all of these religions at once despite the protests of his three religious leaders, who each declare that their religion contains the whole and exclusive truth. Instead of dwelling on a decision, Pi focuses on the stories of his different faiths and their different pathways to God, and he reads a story of universal love in all three religions. He is on his way to Canada with his family when disaster strikes. Their ship sinks and he has to survive on a lifeboat with a bengal tiger for 227 days, then washes up on a beach in Mexico. Gregory Stephen says it is, "a religious