Yann Martel's Life Of Pi

People who take life for granted don't truly accept life and not reshape their identity, until they've tasted adversity and all the vast misfortunes and catastrophe. Yann Martel’s book “Life Of Pi”, shows how adverse situations can help shape a person’s individual identity and play a noteworthy role in one’s life by establishing one’s ability, shaping one’s values and beliefs.

To simply be alive consists of the acts of breathing and having blood pump through the body, but to be a human being consists of much more complexity. The nature composed of a human being involves having self sovereignty on our own emotions, opinions, desires, faiths as well as having a moral subconscious. Yet, what occurs when a situation allows an individual to react in a behaviour that doesn’t follow these defining factors of human nature? In Yann Martel 's Life of Pi, he creates the conflict of a cargo ship sinking, and the only notable survivors on the life raft consists of a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, and a 16-year-old Indian boy. The protagonist of the novel, Pi Patel, is faced with a personal survival conflict

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.

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

When writing, authors need to think of their audience and involve an element of surprise. Authors use plot twists in their writing to help them accomplish surprising the audience, allowing them to keep their audience’s interest. Not only do plot twists help keep the audience’s attention, they also make the audience question their beliefs about what they think of the story. Authors can use this tool to advance their themes. Yann Martel uses a crazy plot twist in his book, the Life of Pi, to suggest to readers that truth is relative.

There was once a man who was driving around in the winter, he lost control of his car and went into a ditch. He awoke to find himself alone in the car with no gas station for miles. He made the decision to start walking, he walked for 2 miles when he came up on a truck. He assumed the owner was hunting as they were in a prime hunting spot. The man peeked inside the truck to find lots of food and warm clothes. If the man broke into the truck and ate the food and put the clothes on should he could get in trouble. He was in a very dangerous life or death situation. This is the question: Should he get in trouble for trying to save his own life? If humans are in life or death situations, they should be able to do whatever is needed to keep themselves alive.

Without morals civilization would crumble, but take away everyone and losing your morals might just save your life. In the book Life of Pi, Yann Martel creates a storyline that follows a boy’s life and the events that occur before, during and after being stranded on a life raft with a tiger. The main character, Pi, undergoes horrendous events that challenge him to change his ways to survive. In times of difficulty, man can lose his morals and values in exchange for survival. Martel exhibits this theme through Pi’s hunger, the cook in the human story, and the slaughtering of Pi’s fellow shipwrecked acquaintances.

Beliefs that an individual or society hold can become a moral code, one to judge actions on and to adhere to. In this way, beliefs become actions. People behave in such a way that their beliefs are brought clearly to light. An individual’s belief shapes not only their behavior, but their intrapersonal thoughts and feelings as well. A belief becomes a pillar that holds up all consequent behavioral aspects of an individual.

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe are both novels about hard work and determination paying off. In both novels, they both start off with saying how the main characters have struggled throughout their lives, up to the point where they decide to make a change. The authors both offer the reader a different point of view on this topic, however they can relate.

As time wears on, the only two animals left on the boat are Pi and a hungry, 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. At first Pi gives up, he believes that it is unrealistic to hope and believe but, like from night to day, Pi is filled with hope. He finds a daily routine consisting of prayer, eating, feeding richard parker, more prayer, and general inspection of the boat. After 274 days Pi finally finds land and is forced to find new ways of finding food. “Tears flowing down my cheeks, I edged myself on until I heard a cracking sound and I no longer felt and life fighting in my hands. I pulled back the folds of the blanket. The flying fish was dead.”(Life of Pi 183) This is the first time Pi has killed another living creature. It should be known that Pi had been a vegetarian for most of his life so killing the fish was very hard on him. As the story continues Pi is forced to overcome his human instincts and give into his animal instincts because if he doesn’t he will have no food. “Killing was no problem.” (Life of PIe 185) In a short amount of time Pi overcame his guilt and sadness over killing the

In Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, our main character is faced with a devastating situation where he struggles with faith and what it feels like to lose part of yourself to our instinctual nature. This story holds many metaphorical meanings about faith and what it means to be human. At the end when it is revealed that there is an alternate story to what happened we can see that they both represent two ways of life. In the original we are introduced to an island that represents Pi’s struggle with his face. We are also given two sets of characters; some human and other animals. With this we can compare how they each reflect each other.

In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi the protagonist, Pi Patel, is trapped on a lifeboat with a cook, a sailor, and his mother. While on the lifeboat, horrific events occur, and in order to lessen the trauma, have motivation to survive, and detach himself from his violent side, Pi creates a delusion. To begin with, he creates a delusion to lessen the trauma of the cook's murder and cannibalism of the sailor and Pi's mother. He replaces the humans with a hyena, zebra, and an orangutan as part of his delusion. Since Pi had been raised in a zoo, he has considerable knowledge of animals.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a compelling, profound, and a well written book. The main character, Piscine Motor Patel is a particularly loving and caring boy, especially for animals. When Pi was younger, he “always shuddered when [he] snapped open a banana because it sounded to [him] as the breaking of an animal's neck.” (page 197). Throughout chapter 61 in Life of Pi, Pi demonstrates how humans act more as animals when put under the right circumstances.

The book I read was the Life of Pi by Yann Matel. Pi Patel was the main character. He was a fourteen-year-old Indian boy from Pondicherry, India. He was deeply religious and practiced three religions; Hindu, Catholicism, and Islam. He was a vegetarian who did not eat meat. Pi lived at the Pondicherry Zoo with his mother, father, and brother Ravi. He was a slim young man with dark hair and dark eyes. His family gave up the zoo (not the animals) and planned to move to Canada on a cargo ship to set up a zoo there. Pi Patel faced his greatest battle to survive on the open sea.

Yann Martel incorporated so many unique writing styles in Life of Pi. The book is split into three different parts each focusing on a separate country. Martel leaves an Author’s Note at the start of the book, it is written in the first person and gives some background information on Yaan. It shows how the author’s own adventures are worked into the book, he blends facts and fiction together which resulted into Life of Pi as we know it. The first and second part of the book, Toronto and Pondicherry and The Pacific Ocean are written in the first person by Pi. The chapters are written almost like diary entries, some may be a few sentences and others can take up to five pages. “I examined one of the rain catchers. It was a device that looked like