Life Of Pi Isolation Essay

Jakob Montemurno English Honors Summer Homework 1. Pi Patel A. Pi is a boy born in Pondicherry, India. He is lives in a zoo which is owned by his family. He is stuck on a lifeboat with an orangutan, tiger, hyena, and zebra after a ship to Canada sinks.

In the book, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Pi becomes a different person after he kills the flying fish. In the beginning of the passage Pi shares that he is a vegetarian, and could never hurt anything living. After Pi kills the flying fish to use for bait, he says, “I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul” (Martel 88). This portrays the morals of Pi before he kills the flying fish. He gives life a great value and is reluctant to interfere with the wellbeing of anything living. Later in the story, Pi kills another fish, this time a dorado. After catching the dorado, Pi says, “killing it was no problem” (Martel 89). The attitude Pi has towards killing a fish changes drastically the second time compared to

Though Pi’s conflict is internal, it affects his actions externally and eventually morphs him into savagery but also hopelessness. His conflict helps him realize how his beliefs limit his means of survival so consequently, he goes to extremes to abandon such beliefs. He even admits to himself that though it is “brutal…a person can get used to…killing” if done often enough (Martel 185). This realization Pi experiences causes him to focus on his methods of killing which leads to an overall comfort in the action. By abandoning his guilt, Pi finds himself able to “[grow] bolder and more agile” and “[descend] to a level of savagery [he] never imagines possible” (Martel 195-7). Not only does he kill more often, he also kills less carefully. Pi shifts from a gentle killer in regards to the victims to “an animal… [with a] noisy, frantic, unchewing wolfing-down” barbaric manner of murder (Martel 225). His evident change from a once caring and unaggressive hunter to a savage killing machine reveals how Pi reacts from his

Yann Martel`s Life of Pi follows A journey of a young man and a Bengal tiger as they travel across the ocean in a lifeboat.Director Ang lee made many consider the book to be beautiful,but virually unflimable.Being needed to told on screen Ang lee discerned very adeptly,about Life of Pi ‘’if there is will there is a way’’.

Lying on the ground, the smell of vomit almost suffocating him, his skin torn open and stomach empty, he begins his hunt for whatever food is within arm’s reach. First he shoves a worm in his mouth telling himself, “Food was energy, and energy was life.” (Pg 127) He then eats a caterpillar, bugs and even a mouse. In some ways he becomes his own mama bird.

Yann Martel's novel (2001) and Ang Lee's film adaption (2012) of Life of Pi harbour themes such as isolation and the extent one would go to in order to survive. The story is split into two parts, the first part focuses on Piscine "Pi" Patel's background and his religious journey. Part two focuses on Pi's predicaments while he is stranded out at sea for 227 days. The second section of the story is renown for Pi's situation with a tiger named Richard Parker. Not only does the protagonist have to focus on his own survival, Pi needed to be attentive of the Bengal tiger; all whilst dealing with his loneliness. Martel and Led convey the ideas of isolation and survivability through the use of several literary and stylistic features throughout the texts.

Once rescued, Pi’s credibility is questioned as he embellishes the accounts of his journey to the Japanese inspectors who find his story unlikely. Pi’s reasoning and rationale are based on illusions and mirages he envisioned while stranded on the lifeboat. His story demonstrates his desire to create a different story in order to avoid the harsh facts of life. Delving into deep and often complex truths, as Gladwell did in Outliers, enforces the reader to face the realities of life as they are and not live under any false illusions. Pi Patel, in Martel’s Life of Pi, differs from Gladwell in that he desires to live in a world of comforting lies. As he narrates his journey to others, Pi fabricates many aspects of the story in order to deceive himself and others surrounding

He was drinking heavily, slipping in and out of flashbacks, screaming and clawing through nightmares, lashing out in fury at random moments. Murdering the Bird had become his secret, fevered obsession, and he had given his life over to it. In a gym near his apartment, he spent hours slamming his hatred into a punching bag, preparing his body for the confrontation that he believed would save him. He walked around every day with murder in his head. ”(Hildenburg 498).

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.

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

Pi’s life is also changed, from a boy living in India, to a deeply religious man, this great pilgrimage for Pi changes him to who he is when he tells the author about his journey from India to Mexico.

Survival in Context The tiger had lepped, as his paws drew his aim across the sky, praying for his next victim; how does one survive this? Worded in literature, authors tend to draw a situation from a non threatening or dangerous task. For this tiger had leaped to retrieve a meer slab of meat; a so called victory over his opposer.

Being isolated, stuck on a boat in the middle of the vast ocean for a long stretch of 227 sweltering days and 227 intensely freezing nights is definitely able to make one go crazy. Pi Patel is in this exact situation. This potentially makes some think that Pi is insane enough to believe that he is actually stuck on boat with a bunch of zoo animals. In the book The Life of Pi written by Yann Martel, the human story is substantially more realistic considering that Pi’s isolation made him go crazy, Pi and Richard Parker experienced the same conditions at the same times, and the likelihood of a starving tiger not eating the only food in sight (Pi Patel) is very slim.

Molitor Patel is a teenage boy that travels with his family from India to Canada on a boat in hopes of a better life. On the way, their boat sinks and Pi is the the lone human survivor. Left only with a handful of zoo animals, including a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, Pi tells his story of survival. Throughout the novel, Life of Pi by Yaan Martel, human significance is displayed through Pi’s isolation and human instincts in connection to the internal human problems of: ceasing to exist, the fulfillment of life, the fine line between savage and survival, and the impact

The Savagery Within Savagery can result in the transformation of one’s character. The identity of an individual can be alternated when the process of savagery is taken place. Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi explores the relationship between savagery and identity. When an individual engages in the act of savagery it functions to alter his or her identity. This notion of savagery initiating will be revealed through actions, words and priorities of Pi.