Life Of Pi Reflection Essay

While on the road to nowhere, Pi starts to acquire water from the rain and obtains food to stock up while he’s worrying about the 400 pound tiger that’s on the lifeboat while Pi is on a small raft. When Pi starts to tame Richard Parker he can finally call him a friend and now has a purpose. As a Hindu, Pi does not eat meat but that went out of the window when he catches a fish and eats it raw to stay alive. When it comes down to survival there is no preference in what to eat.

Pi faces a very extreme environment and a very extreme situation when he had to keep the tiger alive. According to the text, “I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific”, which was his only companion in the middle of the ocean on the lifeboat, to survive.(page 79) In the situation, even under the extreme circumstances Pi stays cool and collected and focus’ only on survival. With the mentality to survive, and wanting to end the pain of thirst, “I think it was this that saved my life that morning, that I was quite literally dying of thirst”(page 81), Pi decided that his life wasn’t going to end now. He

In Life of Pi, his long journey and ardent will to stay alive can alone discribe pi’s transformation from a confused and sheltered boy, into a young man who is now mentally broke but somehow uses his psychological experience to strengthen himself. Pi’s spirituality and religion pushes the reader to shift its perspective.

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.

As Pi has to fight through adversity when he is stranded in a the middle of the Pacific Ocean, he has to adjust his eating habits. When one is in a situation where there is not much to eat, any little thing must be consumed. As a very famous proverb says, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” This was Pi’s most difficult challenge when he was on the boat. As a child, Pi grew up to be a vegetarian. The idea of killing and then consuming an animal really freaked out Pi. He remembered from his childhood, “To think that 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” (197). Even when Pi was eating something like a banana that is not related at all to an animal, he

At the beginning of Life of Pi, Pi Patel has to adapt to his new situation, and the constant fear of his newfound boatmate, a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Pi, a vegetarian must learn to survive, which in his situation, involves the killing and eating of animals. To preserve his life, he must distance himself from his former life of vegetarianism. “I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It’s a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred. I never forget to include this fish in my prayers.” (Martel, 183). Pi has

On his journey to North America, Pi experienced many unfortunate events that no one, especially a sixteen year old should ever have to face. The environment that surrounded Pi was unfamiliar and came with many obstacles. Accompanied by a sailor, taiwanese cook, and his mother, Pi had to face the gruesome truth; his acquaintances were all willing to go to any extent in order to survive. Since food is a necessity of life, these innocent humans were all forced to kill and eat their own kind to stop their hunger. To make this story tolerable, Pi retells it with animals instead of people by replacing: the cook for a hyena, the taiwanese man for a zebra, his mother for Orange Juice and himself for Richard Parker. By altering reality, Pi was able

Pi (and by extension, the author, Yann Martel) seems to think that what should compel one to believe a story is whether the story is a good one – whether it helps readers “see higher or further or differently”. Story and narrative automatically cause viewpoint, or perspective. Perspective as a literary device is a result of stories with framed narration. Is this narrator trustworthy, asks the reader in that ageless dilemma, can I believe what is written? As a form of narration, it both enriches and challenges perspectives on truth. Truth, it seems to say, can also be multi-faceted, appearing in many viewpoints.

Although Pi has taken part in many faiths he must break his beliefs in order to survive. A task that had gotten easier through repetition was fishing and killing many sea animals (fish, turtles) in order to eat. Although this was difficult the first time, when he saw “the thing was gasping for water”(Pg230) he could not kill it. Pi

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

Pi’s physical isolation causes him to judge his own moral beliefs by eating meat for the first time, even though he is a vegetarian. In this quote, “I fished with a variety of hooks at a variety of depths for a variety of fish,” (Martel 215), it explains him fishing. By being a vegetarian his whole life, his physical isolation made him to go against his own moral beliefs of not eating an animal. But eventually survival kicks-in and being physically isolated in the Pacific Ocean caused Pi to betray his own personal belief.

Throughout Yann Martel’s Life of Pi many elements of the novel blur the lines of reality and fantasy. This leaves multiple facets of perspectives in his readers. Patel is thrust to the forefront of a catastrophic ordeal resulting in the loss of everything he knows and loves. As this occurs, we begin to see the total brutality of survival in both stories. Martel’s phenomenal use of symbolism, dualism, and religious allegory eloquently convey this imaginative world of brutality, savagery, and thirst for survival.

Pi spends an extended period of time at sea, and becomes quite difficult, especially with a 450-pound Bengal tiger on board with him. Pi break away from his vegetarian beliefs, “Lord, to think I’m a strict vegetarian. To think that 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. I descended to a level of savagery I never imagined possible”(Martel 249). Given the life and death situation, Pi loses a part of him in order to survive.

Pi finds himself on a shipwreck in the middle of the ocean. Physical survival is essential, but mental and spiritual survival are just as important. Pi does what he has to in order to stay alive, sometimes at the expense of his health. He boards a lifeboat with a tiger, a hyena, an orangutan, and a zebra. As days pass, all are killed except for the tiger, who is called Richard Parker, and Pi. The hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, then the tiger kills the hyena. To stay alive, Pi has to build a raft to avoid conflict with the animals. This is a lesson he learned when he was a young boy: staying

In the book Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, the protagonist becomes marooned in a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with only several zoo animals and his analytical mind to keep him company. Piscine Molitor Patel or otherwise known as Pi Patel, uses religion as he escape route and his knowledge of animal behavior to turn a horrendous ordeal into something survivable. Yann Martel states that out of all 100 chapters of his novel, that chapters 21 and 22 are the core of his book. These two philosophical chapters alone help define Pi’s story and how everyone should believe ‘the better story’. Even those these two chapters are very short, they are the heart of the novel because it highlights religion in general, the qualities of an agnostic or atheist individual and how everyone should choose to believe in what Martel calls “the better story” (Martel 63).