The Potential Metaphorical Significance Of Pi's Journey

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,

The violent outbreak of Richard Parker, along with his silent departure at the end of the novel, portrays how futile it is to try to change a wild animal into a civilized being. Richard Parker seems, at first, to have experienced a spiritual breakthrough and transformation after Pi’s attempt to training. Even in the end, Pi’s ability to survive such a journey with a beastly killer seems evidence enough that Pi trained the tiger. Pi’s main goal, along with survival, is to establish a level of equality between himself

During this part of the novel, Pi’s father is teaching him a lesson by letting a tiger brutally kill a goat right in front of him. He is trying to teach Pi to not go near an animal such as tigers because they are incredibly dangerous. I believe this thread represents the foreshadowing of what is to come for Pi.

The tiger that Pi refers to throughout his ordeal is could be perceived as the alter-ego of himself, “The tiger killed the hyena- and the blind Frenchman- just as he killed the cook” (311). While Pi was able to use his imagination to portray a tiger as himself, Richard Parker was never more than an extension of Pi’s imagination. Richard Parker simply symbolized Pi in the real world and could never

Therefore, many aspects of the tiger like his relationship with Pi and his physical attributions give Pi incentive to stay alive during his long journey.

In chapter 8 Ravi, Pi and their parents are at the zoo and Pi’s father is teaching his sons a lesson on the dangerousness of a tiger by

Commentary: When the author notes a step by step way of training the tiger, the reader better understands how important zoos, animals, and animal training was in Pi’s childhood, being the son of a zoo keeper. Instead of reading a training manual (like in the movie) Pi comes up with his own theory on how to tame Richard Parker.

With the information given to us in the first 36 chapters in the book, we learn about his journey through the first three parts of the Hero’s Journey; Ordinary Life, The Call to adventure, and the Refusal of the Call. We start off in Pi’s ordinary life, where we learn that he was raised in a zoo in Pondicherry, India. This gives us through the rest of the book of the deep respect he has for all forms of

Ultimately, Pi was a sensitive man who did not believe in killing animals, but when left in a life or death situation, Pi killed many fish along the days he was stranded in the ocean in order to live. Although this transformation is not easy, it is necessary for the hero ..... This transformation is displayed in the novel when Pi talks about remorse when killing an animal, " You may be astonished that in such a short period of time I could go from weeping over the muffled killing of a flying fish to gleefully bludgeoning to death a dorado." (Martel 205). In addition, Edward Bloom goes through a different transformation of his own.

The will to live is a strong urge of survival that occurs when one’s life is threatened. The novel and film Life of Pi is about a boy named Piscine Molitor Patel who is lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean due to a shipwreck with a 450 pound Bengal Tiger. The theme that fits the novel and film the best is the will to live. The novel and film effectively prove the theme by using symbols to portray how badly Pi wants to live. Characterization also plays an important role in proving the theme as the novel and book show how Pi and his tiger have to change themselves to live. Cinematic techniques such as different types of camera angles are used as well to prove that the will to live is the essential theme in the film. In the novel, Yann Martel shows how the camera angles prove what they prove. The film and novel Life of Pi effectively capture the theme of the will to live by the effective use of symbolism, characterization, and cinematic techniques.

In addition, Pi decides to feed a “450-pound” (Martel 61) bengal tiger named Richard Parker for his own self preservation. He acknowledges, “I had to tame him. It was at that moment that I realized this necessity…More likely the worst would happen: the simple passage of time, in which his animal toughness would easily outlast my human frailty” (Martel 164). This means that Pi fears that the fierce animal strength and power of Richard Parker would eventually kill and eat him for food.

When Pi first broads the ship he forgets that Richard Parker, the tiger, is present; however when the tiger appears and kills the hyena Pi is given a surprise about exactly how dangerous his predicament is. Although Pi is faced with a 450-pound carnivore, he is able to train it and they coexist peacefully. This is only one of Pi’s characteristics that assist him in his problem.

At the end of the story he ask “Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?” These two men respond and admits that the animal story is the better one and through this readers can get a major theme of the book, faith. Through the whole story Pi’s survival is mainly because of faith in his religion. Although religion can not be proven he has faith that it is real. Likewise the realness of Pi’s story is the same as religion and readers will have to have faith in Pi’s journey of faith that the story is

He describes how it was very painful for him when the tiger left him. Pi is sad and cried, cause of he attempts to do something impossible and failed: the use of human nature to understand the beast. For all the wickedness, humans do not want to see it. Therefore, humans make themselves find an explanation, incorporate them into the framework of the world that they can understand, accept them, and then live peacefully. The kind of things people do every day, such as “crime”, people always find a reasonable motive for committing a crime, either for money or love; if a criminal commits, a crime not for money or love, they would just simply do so to enjoy the pleasure of crime. People are afraid, they cannot understand them. Human nature cannot

Throughout Pi’s life at sea and after being rescued, he makes an example of many important figures and states of being in the Hindu religion. Pravritti: “people who choose to live in the world rather than withdraw from it.” (Carnagie et al.) The contradictory Nivritti: those who choose to withdraw from life. Dharma: “righteousness in one’s religious and personal life.” (Carnagie et al.) Finally, Artha: “prosperity and success in material affairs.” (Carnagie et al.) These four words play an important part on the happenings inside Pi’s mind, as well as how his life moves along.