Yann Martel's Life Of Pi

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

There are many instances in Pi’s story in which symbolism plays an important role in communicating meaning to readers. At the end of the novel, Pi reveals to Japanese investigators a story that details his journey of survival that replaces the animals with humans. In this retold story, Richard Parker is replaced by Pi. The idea of Pi and Richard Parker being one and the same indicates that a part of Richard Parker is present in Pi’s true character. Pi makes this comment on fear: “It is a clever, treacherous adversary...It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy” (Martel 161). This description of fear sounds an awful lot like how one could describe a feral tiger. Richard Parker, then, is symbolic of Pi’s fear and of how he is able to eventually control it. Another example of symbolism is the lifeboat. The lifeboat, his salvation from the perils of sea, is symbolic of his faith in God. He clings to the lifeboat when he is in need just as he clings to God in his time of dire need. The boat, and therefore his faith, is what eventually carries him to safety. Richard Parker and the lifeboat are examples of symbolism that reveal hidden aspects of Pi’s true

Yann Martel offers two accounts of Pi’s survival story so that Pi is able to personify animals and also give animalistic qualities to humans. This exchange is only seen after both accounts are read. The reader is able to determine which he or she accepts as reality, but since the facts of the story go unchanged and both tales are primarily the same, the sole purpose is to highlight the traits humans and animals posses. Yann Martel exemplifies human traits in animals and animal traits in people through his claim in passage A by telling the two stories of Pi’s survival.

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.

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.

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.

Richard Parker, the tiger, is a symbol of Pi himself. Pi directly correlates himself with Richard Parker. If Richard Parker “give[s] up” (121) then Pi is giving up. When swimming toward the life boat Richard Parker “look[s] small and helpless” (121) much like Pi actually is. Next to the tiger, zebra, and hyena Pi is small and feeble; he has no way to defend himself against the other animals. Pi egging Richard Parker on, toward the boat; “keep[ing him] swimming” (122) shows Pi’s resilience for survival; determined for Richard Parker to survive, which is actually his determination to survive. It is often mistaken in the novel as to whether Pi is speaking of himself or of Richard Parker because they could be the same being.

Throughout his young life, Pi has been guided by a strong set of morals and values. A strict pacifist and vegetarian, Pi never dreamed of killing an animal, especially for food. Pi states, “…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” (Martel 197). However, faced with starvation at sea, Pi must decide between adhering to his morals and satisfying his ravenous hunger when a school of flying fish descends upon the lifeboat. He chooses his own survival and decides he must butcher a fish to feed himself. Martel uses vivid details and language to convey Pi’s feelings about the necessity of violence and killing a living creature for survival. Martel conveys a sense of suspense to the reader as Pi raises his hatchet several times to

Surviving a tragic situation is a true test of external strengths and, more importantly, internal strength. The use of mental strength allows for many people to conquer various obstacles throughout a journey. The novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel allows readers to imagine a young boy named Piscine Patel trying to survive a shipwreck using everything that he learns and experiences. Piscine Patel survives many things such as dehydration, starvation, living on a lifeboat with animals, drowning, and crashing on a foreign island. The personality traits of Piscine Patel are what enable him to survive and the three most important character traits that he possesses are optimism, intelligence and perseverance.

The first theme we see in The Life of Pi is storytelling. Arguably the most important theme storytelling and the journal he found in the survival kit are the things that keep Pi sane. Writing down his thoughts acted like a stress, reliever it calmed him down. Every day he had to write something in order to keep his calm. At the end of the story Pi has told two different stories and it's questionable if he really did talk to the different castaway, or was he just hallucinating.

Level 1: The "Basic needs or Physiological needs" of a human being: food, water, sleep and sex. Pi decides to fish. He is not successful at fishing on his own, but flying fish begin to jump into the boat. Pi feeds one to Richard Parker, who then eats many on his own. Pi stores several fish, then uses the flying fish's head as bait and kills one himself. "I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain." The cook built a raft to help with fishing; Pi also built a raft to flee the tiger. Pi must survive 227 days without any human company, and yet somehow he is able to grow from his suffering and “write” this novel. “The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada I used my fingers.

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

The main theme in the narrative is the “survival of the fittest” concept. This is shown through the intense, extreme situations Piscine will endure to be alive, whether they are horrific things, or heroic actions of bravery and courage. Pi goes far out of his comfort zone in many situations, putting his morals and values to the test. “It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.” (Martel 185) In this situation Pi is brutally murdering an innocent flying fish for food, completely abandoning all his principles. He

Opposition inhabits all corners of earth. In turn, opposites create balance, an essential element in mental and physical well-being. All too often, two extremes lose balance, and rather than creating equality and positive change, a series of conflicts arise. War, in the current era, comes frequently and concerns a multitude of unbalanced opposites, ranging from religion to property lines to ancestry. While external conflict affects a greater number of people and can be seen, internal battles often prove more difficult to resolve. Each individual copes with struggle, both internal and external, with different mechanisms. Some rise and conquer, others succumb to the opposing force, and some learn to live alongside it. Life of Pi, written by Yann Martel, illustrates the significance of internal struggle and awakening as paralleled to its external counterparts through the voice of boy enduring intense trials of both mind and body.