Life Of Pi by Yann Martel Essay

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 alone with Richard Parker on the lifeboat and they both starve and suffer with dehydration. Pi starts catching fishes for both of them. He always gives the biggest share to Richard Parker as he is the strongest. One day, he decides to eat the largest part. He wants to calm his desire for hunger. He does not want to share anything with Richard Parker. Pi starts eating like an animal. Pi tells, “It came as an unmistakable indication to me of how I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal” (Martel 183). The innocent boy is now as dangerous as an animal that can do anything for the food. His yearning for food makes him selfish. It is in pi’s hand not to sacrifices his integrity, but he chooses to sacrifice because he knows that at this critical situation it is right to do. Even though Pi loses his integrity, he gains the power of being the strongest one on the

Humans generally face struggles in their lifetime. Such struggles could be within themselves or with someone or something else but commonly stem from some sort of opposition in lifestyle. In Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, Pi’s passion for personal survival conflicts with his moral obligations to himself internally, morphing his external character.

The way Pi acts throughout his journey suggests that having faith is one of the most important practises to learn as it can give an individual hope. Pi has a strong connection to all his practising faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Society is set to have many unspoken rules that we must abide by to

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.

God, having been alongside Pi ever since, relieved his confusion, stress, and anxiety that he faced the duration of the journey. The only known mean of communication was through prayers and Pi, being a true devotee, prayed more than any other activity on the boat, averaging around five times a day. This shows the value of the bond he has with God as he continues to put God as his top priority over his safety. He even dedicates one of his scarcest resources, food, to use as “pujas with turtle meat for Prasad,” (Martel 231). Yet, he claims “That [praying] was one key to my [his] survival."(Martel 210). His devotion to God gave meaning to his life and increased his strength to

"Thy will be done". Pi is fascinated by, in search of Hinduism, Catholicism until Islam. From each of the religion it draws patterns that help him understand the surrounding world. In the end, all questions are answered in his “lonely” journey. Pi which although gives God his life while loses everything and all what he loves in single moment. Pi’s journey where it seemed it was only bad moments, but Pi from his spirituality would find and relate everything thru his faith, It gave him reason to believe that it will have a good ending. ”It is the irony of this story that the one who scared me witless to start with was the very same who brought me peace, purpose, I dare say even wholeness.” (Martel,pg.57). As Pi told the Yann that without his love for religion and spiritual life he would not have survived. Pi used his faith of three religions as a guidance, he managed to keep his prayers daily and routinely. As Pi fought for his life not only the tiger gave him worries but the ocean emptiness around him for so long we would think Pi would just quit and give up on everything, but Pi was so influenced by the religion it kept him motivated. Thru his journey Pi cared more about the tiger named Richard Parker, he risked his life to keep the tiger satisfied with food and water. Pi had balance danger and peace of his religious

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.

Firstly, Pi goes through a lot of struggles while lost at sea. He wars with himself on topics such as his views on religion and his decision

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

1. Marvelous body of Richard Parker as both an image of God and a sign

Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi, tells a miraculous survival story that everyone will want to believe. He tells readers about the life a boy, who later in the story gets stuck on a lifeboat with fierce companions for 227 days. Piscine Molitor Patel, otherwise known as “Pi”, accompanies his family in moving to Canada from India, though the ship sinks and he then tells his journey twice. Pi told his journey in two versions, an animal version, and a human version. In both versions Pi is accompanied with a zebra/sailor, a hyena/cook, his own mother/orangutan, and himself/tiger (Martel 311). Though the characters in the novel, like Pi, the Chinese officials, and the writer, preferred the animal version, the preferred version would be the human version.

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’’.

The book is written from the point of view of Pi and his experiences as a castaway for 227 days. Pi is stuck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as the ship he was traveling on, the Tsimtsum, has sunken into the ocean along with his family and their zoo animals after a storm. Much of the book is about Pi on the lifeboat with an adult 3 year old Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. If the setting were different, Pi’s family would most likely be alive and would be living a life in Canada.