Life Of Pi

Sigmund Freud's psychology theories can be applied to any story. The id, ego, and superego are all apart of his theories.(Purdue) They will be applied to the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Life of Pi is a true story about a 16 year old boy, named Pi Molitor Patel, who moves to Canada but the journey will not go as planned. He is stranded, in the ocean and along his journey he does many things he never thought he would do in a million years. When interviewed by Yann Martel he reveals many crucial details about what really happened out at sea. In the novel, Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger in the animal story or Pi’s unconscious in the story with the humans, is the id. The id is the basic desire. It is the fundamental root of what each

The superego is the opposite of the id. This is the repository of all socially imposed behavior and sense of guilt.(class notes) In addition to the story of Pi being stranded at sea with the animals, Yann Martel also shared details of Pi’s life previously in Pondicherry, India. By doing this he shows Pi’s attitude toward religion and eating meat and the changes he went through abandoning beliefs that were so important to him in order to survive. However, as the reader nears the end of the novel, the author does change the whole point of view of the readers and how they perceive the story. He tells the same story except it takes place with humans instead of animals. Everything Pi does to survive seems rational until this point in the story. Although it is the same story, everything that Pi did is seen as brutal and disturbing. Now that the hyena is the cook, the mother is Orange Juice, the sailor is the zebra, and Pi is Richard Parker, we can’t give a rational reasons for the events that took place for example, “It’s what hyenas do, they will eat anything.” The author showed what was socially accepted and why Pi might have came up with another scenario with the animals. In the beginning of the story he had said not everything he put into the novel would be true and it was exaggerated. He may not be a part of Pi’s unconscious, but he did influence the story through his writing by