Pi’s Story: Fantasy or Tragedy?
In any incident, when there is more than one person present, there’ll be two different versions of one story because everyone perceives things differently. In this case, there’s only one survivor from a lifeboat out at sea, Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi). Once Pi has made it to land after being lost at sea for 227 days, two investigators travel to him, hoping to find what caused the sinking of the Tsimtsum, the ship he was on. When he is asked to share his story of what happened, he has two different versions. One being so unbelievable that you want to believe it, the other being so horrible to hear it makes you pray the other is true. The two stories may have a connection as a way for Pi to come to terms with
…show more content…
This story is just as gruesome, however. This story includes Pi’s mother, the ship’s despicable cook, and an injured Japanese sailor. The sailor has a broken leg, and in order to “save him” the cook suggests cutting off his leg; he tells Pi and his mother it will help the sailor to survive. The mother agrees, and helps with the amputation. When the cook doesn’t throw the amputated leg into the ocean, Pi’s mother realizes something is wrong with the cook. They later find out cutting the leg off did not benefit the sailor but actually led to his death (Martel). They also learn that the cook was planning on using the leg as bait for fish. Eventually the cook becomes cannibalistic and eats part of the dead sailor. The cook poses an extremely large threat to both Pi and his mother once this becomes evident. Pi’s state of hunger reaches a state that even he takes part in eating the sailor's leg; this act is made even more grim because Pi is a vegetarian. This version of Pi’s tale also includes the raft as well. When Pi’s mother tries to fight off the cook she urges him to get off of the lifeboat and onto the raft to protect himself. When this happens, Pi watches the cook kill his mother, though he makes no attempt to harm Pi. In the end, Pi kills the cook and has the entire boat to himself. After Pi finishes telling this version, the investigators make a connection that the animals are represented by …show more content…
Pi had most likely made up the first version in order to deal with the trauma from the events he had suffered. Pi may have felt guilty for not trying harder to wake up his brother Ravi. When Pi had woken up from the ship making weird noises he stated, “He looked at me sleepily. He shook his head and turned over, pulling the sheet up to his cheek. Oh, Ravi!” (127). This may have caused Pi to blame himself for his brother not making it. In one instance, Pi admits that the events were taking a toll on him mentally. He stated, “I was getting used to the mental delusion. To make it last I refrained from putting a strain on it; when the lifeboat nudged the island, I did not move, only continued to dream” (324). Version one is very similar to version two in a way. Pi used it as a coping skill so he doesn’t have to deal with how it affected him mentally and emotionally. In version one, each animal represents one of the people aboard. Richard Parker represents the more animalistic side of Pi. He uses Richard to make himself more heroic and seem stronger. In the beginning of the book when Pi states, “In the present circumstances, where Richard Parker would be under tremendous mental strain, fear should have brought out an exceptional level of aggression.” (137), it foreshadows that Pi will be under a great deal of stress. Pi also uses version one to dehumanize the act of cannibalism that took place. Instead of recognizing
At the end of the novel, Pi narrates another story, which is so cruel that it does not match the "Happy Ending" in the last sentence of the first part. In this story, Pi’s mother and four real people fall into the lifeboat instead of Pi and three animals, and eventually we find that only Pi survived. He not only has to see his mother being killed, but also has to eat human bodies to keep alive like that cook.
Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” shows all three of the main elements of a hero’s journey: the departure, initiation and the return, helping the story to greatly resemble Joseph Campbell’s structure of a hero’s journey. Through the trials Pi has to face, he proves himself to be a true hero. He proves himself, not just while trapped on the lifeboat with Richard Parker, but also before the sinking of the Tsimtsum. His achievement to fulfill the heroic characteristics of Campbell’s model are evident as he goes though the three stages.
To start out with, in the story, “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel, a vegetarian kid named Pi is stranded on a lifeboat after a shipwreck with a tiger named Richard Parker. Even though it
Two men come along to meet him to see how the Tsimtsum actually sank. Pi shares his knowledge with the two men, but the information he gives them does not involve the Tsimtsum because he doesn’t know how it sanked in the first place. Pi now has this information and facts that will be forever in his heart, never ever to leave.
In part three, Pi tells a different story to the people who found him, Mr. Okamoto and Mr.Chiba, another different story because they wanted one that would sound believable to the public and actually help in their investigation of how the ship sunk. He tells the
Having just experienced the sinking of his family’s ship, and being put onto a life boat with only a hyena, Pi felt completely lost and alone. When he sees Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger from his family’s zoo, it is a familiar face to him. His initial reaction is to save the life of his familiar friend so that he may have a companion, and a protector aboard the lifeboat. Suddenly Pi realizes just what he is doing. He is saving the life of Richard Parker, by welcoming him, a 450 pound Bengal tiger, onto the small lifeboat. He experiences a change of heart when helping the tiger onto the boat. Pi realizes that he is now posing a threat on his own life. With Richard Parker on the boat, Pi is faced with not only the fight to survive stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but the fight to survive living with a meat eating tiger. The change of heart that Pi experiences might possibly mean that he is an impulsive thinker. It may mean that he often does something on impulse without thinking it through, and then later regrets his actions.
...eating the zebra alive in Chapter 45. Another example of Thanatos is shown when the hyena bites a hole into the zebra and Pi feels a sense of hatred towards the hyena for hurting the zebra and he even considers attacking it. An id and ego split is also shown between Pi and Richard Parker by showing Richard Parker to be an imaginary tiger that is created by Pi in order to keep him alive and focused on staying alive. Pi eventually abandons his superego and partakes in eating meat, even though he was a strict vegetarian prior to being lost at sea. Over the duration of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the story relates to Freud’s theories in several ways that are made blatantly obvious; these relations are what makes this story come together to keep the reader involved and interested.
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 story he or she thinks is true, but rather what story he or she thinks is the better story. In real life, this applies in a very similar way to common belief systems and religion. Whether or not God is real or a religion is true is not exactly the point, but rather whether someone chooses to believe so because it adds meaning and fulfillment to his or her life. Life of Pi is relevant to life in its demonstration of storytelling as a means of experiencing life through “the better story.”
He lives in a zoo, and is surrounded and influenced by animals daily. His knowledge of animals grows as he does, and he learns and sees new things year after year at the zoo. One peculiar, yet crucial thing that Pi learns while living in the zoo, is the concept of zoomorphism. Zoomorphism, “is where an animal takes a human being or another animal, to be one of its kind”(84). He explains that within the zoo that he spent his childhood, there were many cases of zoomorphism, from the strange friendly relationship between the goats and the rhinoceroses, to the even stranger friendly predator-prey relationship between a viper and a mouse. Pi then says that the only explanation for zoomorphism is that the “measure of madness moves life in strange but saving ways”(85). The rhinoceros and goats get along because the rhinoceros, “[is] in need of companionship”(85), and without the goats, the rhinoceros would become depressed and die. This explanation of zoomorphism is major foreshadowing and background on why Richard Parker and Pi can live together on the lifeboat. Like the rhinoceros, both Pi and Richard Parker would have died without the company of another being. The “madness” that is the relationship between Richard Parker and Pi, scares Pi and causes him stress. However, this stress and fear keeps Pi alive, and ultimately saves his life. Therefore, the story with the animals is true, because
This unimaginable tale, is the course of events upon Pi’s journey in the Pacific ocean after the ship that Pi and his family were aboard crashes, leaving him stranded with a tiger named Richard Parker, an orangutan, a zebra, and a hyena. Pi loses everything he has and starts to question why this is happening to him. This is parallel to the story of Job. Job is left with nothing and is experiencing great suffering and he begins to demand answers from God. Both Pi and Job receive no answers, only being left with their faith and trust. To deal with this great suffering Pi begins to describe odd things which begin to get even more unbelievable and ultimately become utterly unrealistic when he reaches the cannibalistic island. Richard Parker’s companionship serves to help Pi through these events. When the reader first is intoduced to Richard Parker he emerges from the water, making this symbolic of the subconscious. Richard Parker is created to embody Pi’s alter ego. Ironically, each of these other animals that Pi is stranded with comes to symbolize another person. The orangutan represents Pi’s mother, the zebra represents the injured sailor, and the hyena represents the cook. Pi fabricated the people into animals in his mind to cope with the disillusion and trails that came upon him while stranded at the erratic and uncontrollable sea,
...knowledge his shadow self. He was able to survive his plight on the lifeboat because of the characteristics of his shadow self, Richard Parker. Even at the loss of his shadow self, Pi remains connected and constantly misses this part of his persona. After his ordeal on the lifeboat, Pi becomes rational and humane; however his experiences has scarred him, and will forever remain with him. Readers can definitely learn from Pi’s experience with his shadow self. The more we refute our shadow, the more it weighs us down. However, if we are willing to come to terms with the reality of our shadow, learn how it works, “tame” it so that it does not control us, we would be more literate and enlightened.
Mr. Patel continues explaining how his father contracts a Japanese ship to transport his family, along with a number of their zoo animals, from India to Canada in order to avoid political upheaval. While traveling, the ship began sinking and Pi was the only one to manage to make it onto the lifeboat and survive the wreck. The disaster left Pi, along with a few animals, to be the only survivors all in one lifeboat.... ... middle of paper ...
The similarities show that in both the movie and the text, Pi was able to survive by using a limited amount of resources, although he was stranded in the middle of the ocean. The differences show that Pi’s thoughts wouldn’t have been as interesting if the movie expressed them as thorough as they were expressed in the text. From contrasting both the movie and the text, it can be seen that the movie has some added details that make it more visually pleasing. In my opinion, the movie was more enjoyable than the text because although Pi’s thoughts weren’t exactly expressed, the movie showed more emotion and it was more visual than the text. The movie showed Pi’s feelings and thoughts by showing us his actions and speech. The movie also shows more background than the text by showing us how Pi ends up stranded in the middle of the Pacific. Overall, the movie is more visual and brings about more emotion in the viewer. One thing I would change about the text to improve it is to add more of the action that was shown in the movie to make the text more
The projection of Richard Parker helps Pi to be aware of this current situation, which was him being stranded in the ocean on a lifeboat in comparison to his beliefs in his religions. His fear towards Richard Parker was one of the reasons of his survival. Pi says, “Fear and reason fought over answer. Fear said yes. He was a fierce, 450-pound carnivore. Each of his claws was sharp as a knife” (Martel 108). Pi describes Richard Parker as an extremely dangerous, fearful, and vicious predator. This causes Pi keep aware because he is on a boat with a deadly carnivore. He tries to keep awake at night while being on the lifeboat with Richard Parker from the fear of being attacked and eaten by the Bengal tiger. However, since Richard Parker is Pi’s id, it was actually him keeping himself aware and alive. Pi states, “If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker. He kept me from thinking too much about my family and my tragic circumstances” (Martel 164). This shows how Richard Parker occupies Pi’s mind and influences his thoughts about the tragic incident that has happened. The will to live for Pi is no longer his family, but Richard Parker, his id. Richard Parker taught Pi how to survive based on his instincts an...
Right before the men depart, Pi asks them this question, “In both stories the ship sinks, my entire family dies, and I suffer… Which is a better story?” (Page 398). He points out that there is no factual difference either way, so it makes the most sense to tell the more compelling tale. It is more intriguing for listeners, and easier for Pi to cope with having to talk about the situation. Immediately, after he makes this point, when told the men will be watching out for Richard Parker, the tiger, Pi explains, “He’s hiding somewhere you’ll never find him.” (Page 399). Richard Parker symbolizes Pi when he is on the lifeboat; The part of him he doesn’t want to admit is there and wants to forget. By using illusion to tell his story he is able to reference that the part of him he thinks of as the tiger is now gone for good. Proven by this, Pi relies deeply on illusion to portray his inner feelings instead of telling them as they