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Moral stories of life of pi essay
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Moral stories of life of pi essay
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We, as humans, often underestimate the fragility of our morals and “humanity”. In Life of Pi, author Yann Martel tells the story of a young boy named Pi who, after being shipwrecked and losing his entire family, must somehow survive in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a grown tiger for days on end by abandoning all the morals he once valued. Through Pi’s story, Martel shows how easily humans can become akin to animals when finding themselves in a desperate situation. Through Pi’s starvation, Martel first shows that depriving a person of a basic need like food can drive people to beast-like ways in order to satisfy their urges. After being on the lifeboat with barely any food for more days than he could count, Pi decides to eat some of …show more content…
When Pi discovers the tiger, Richard Parker, on the lifeboat after his ship sinks, Pi is horrified. In this panicked state, Pi mentions that he “...hatched several plans to get rid of him” (198). The Pi from before being introduced to this type of suffocating anxiety would have never even considered making another creature suffer, but by being cornered by both fear of death and terror of Richard Parker’s might, Pi can think only of how he can survive. Pi also begins to make rash decisions when he tries to tame Richard Parker out of fear of being killed. Pi takes a dangerous risk the first time he tries to tame Richard Parker, reflecting on the whole experience: “Richard Parker bared his teeth, rotated his ears full round, vomited a short guttural roar and charged. A great, full-clawed paw rose in the air and...sent me flying off the boat” (260). In this particular incident, Pi runs on his fear of death and attempts to do something that ends up putting him in even more danger. However, his decision-making skills had been greatly inhibited by his sense of trepidation and were replaced by pure instinct telling him that he had to do something dramatic to
Pi was afraid and surprised that Richard Parker was in the boat once he had lifted the blanket. Then Richard Parker had roared at him and tried to attack by his claws ,but pi had gotten away as soon as he did. Pi and Richard Parker started to roamed slowly around the boat in the middle of the ocean. Pi didn't trust Richard Parker because he knows that he only wanted to kill and eat pi. Pi tried to get rid of the tiger and then he tried avoiding the tiger, but as time goes on he got tired of trying get rid of Richard Parker. So then he began tame the tiger by using his whistle he had gotten from his locker. As he and Richard Parker started to get along through the past days,they have become really close friends.
Stranded for 227 days at sea in a lifeboat, with no one else except an adult Bengal tiger. This is exactly what the main character Pi, in "The Life of Pi" went through. "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel is a story about a boy named Piscine Molitor Patel, an Indian boy who survives more than seven months floating on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean, with no one else but a 450-pound tiger (Cooper). Yann Martel was born on June 25, 1963, in Salamanca, Spain. His parents, Emile Martel and Nicole Perron, were both born in Canada. He spent his childhood in several different countries, including France, Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica. As an adult, he lived in many other places but one of them was India, which may be where he got inspiration for writing “Life of Pi”. Yann Martel uses the literary elements similes and foreshadowing, to express the theme that believing in religion can give you the faith to want to survive.
Life of Pi explores the limits of confinement in two different settings. Piscine, the character referred to as Pi whose story is shared with readers, lived at the Pondicherry Zoo in India, and he also survived in the Pacific Ocean for a period of time. At the zoo, Piscine does not directly face confinement, but he witnesses it with the animals his father keeps in captivity. “Closed and locked” cages with “bars and a trapdoor separate” the animals’ dwellings from one another (Martel 34). The creatures remain dependent on their keeper’s to supply them with the essential amount of food, water, attention, and care since they are unable to fend for themselves in their new habitat. Pi later experiences all that the zoo animals do as he becomes stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat after his family’s boat sinks while moving to Canada. Confinement possesses a different meaning in his experience. He relies heavily on what few resources he has been graced with on the lifeboat. His situation escalates as he realizes that a Bengal tiger, which he refers to as Richard...
With the lifeboat symbolising faith and Richard Parker as Pi’s primal instinct, Martel depicts Pi’s prolonged fight for survival as assuming the behaviour of a tiger allows him to endure the voyage. By foreshadowing Pi’s tense relationship with a tiger and the tragic sinking of the ship, the audience speculates that Pi will persevere, despite his unfortunate circumstances. Lastly, the recurring motif of food, water and territory requires both castaways to respect and depend on each other for their survival. Through the literary techniques of symbolism, foreshadowing and motifs, Martel enables the audience to explore the central theme of survival as they too experience being a castaway in the Pacific Ocean through Pi’s life
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.
“The presence of God is the finest of rewards.” (Yann Martel, Life of Pi 63) In Yann Martel’s riveting novel “Life of Pi” The basic plot of survival unfolds, however, this essay will show how the hidden yet the dominant theme of religion throughout the story is what helped the main character Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) survive.
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
In the novel Life of Pi, the author Yann Martel does state that the novel will have a happy ending but when looking more deeply into this idea, it shows that the novel did not in fact have a happy ending for Pi. This can be proven from the fact that all his loved ones left him, from his suffering and the experience traumatized him.
Martel’s novel is about the journey of a young man being forced to test his limits in order to survive the unthinkable predicament of being lost at sea alongside an adult Bengal tiger. Life of Pi starts out by introducing an anonymous author on a quest to find his next big story and goes to a man by the name of Piscine Molitor Patel who supposedly has a story worth hearing. Patel begins his story talking about his childhood and the main events that shaped him such as his family’s zoo, the constant curiosity in religion he sought as a young boy and also how he got his nickname Pi. 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 life boat and survive the wreck. The disaster left Pi along with a fe...
Pi is full of love. He has it for everything that is alive. This is quite possibly why pi is a vegetarian. He loves all things that live in a way. He loves life so much that he had issues killing fish. He swung a hatchet at a fish’s head multiple times but couldn’t beat it to death. He couldn’t look at it while he killed it so he wrapped it up and broke its neck(189). His love was not always equal for everything though. His love for himself and for Richard Parker was more powerful than his love of life for other lives. This lead to him killing fish and turtles. This is a feeling. Martel probably knew that most people have somebody that they care about extremely. Somebody that they care enough about to bend their morals to protect and to make sure that they live. By showing the love that Pi has through having him say it things like “I really do. I love you, Richard Parker. If I didn’t have you now, I don’t know what I would do. I don’t think I would Make it. No, I wouldn’t”(236). Martel uses these little spurts of love in his novel to try to connect to the reader. He also uses it as an attempt to engage the reader with emotion by seeing that love can be extremely pushing and when it’s all you have left, that it is
“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive” (Martel 44-45). Inside every human being, there is an extremely primal and animalistic trait that can surface when the will to survive becomes greater than the morals of the person. This trait allows humans to overcome their fear to do things which they wouldn’t normally be able to do in order to survive when they’re in extreme peril and in a do or die situation. Throughout the book, Life of Pi, survival is a dominant and central theme. The will to survive changes people and this includes the main character of the story, Piscine Molitor Patel. Survival will even change the most timid, religious, and law-abiding people. Yann Martel, using Pi as an example, tries to explain that all humans must do three things in order to survive a life threatening event: one must give up their morals, one must find a way to keep sane, and one must be ready to compromise and sacrifice.
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...
Imagine being stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat, not alone but with some carnivorous animals, as company. The chances of survival do not seem so high, but when one has the will to survive, they can do anything to attain it. Pi Patel and his family are on their way to Canada from Pondicherry, India, when their cargo ship the Tsimtsum sinks. Pi is not the only survivor of the ship, along with him is a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan and a 450-pound orange Bengal tiger. Pi travels across the Pacific Ocean in only a lifeboat, with food dwindling quickly, he needs to find land and most of all survive the voyage. In Life of Pi; Yann Martel develops the idea that having the will to survive is a crucial key to survival; this is demonstrated through symbolism of the colour orange, having religion on the protagonist’s side and the thirst and hunger experienced by the protagonist.
People don't truly accept life for what it is until they've actually tasted adversity and went through those misfortunes and suffering. We are put through many hardships in life, and we learn to understand and deal with those issues along the way. We find that life isn't just about finding one's self, but about creating and learning from our experiences and background. Adversity shapes what we are and who we become as individuals. Yann Martel's Life of Pi shows us that adverse situations help shape a person's identity and play a significant role in one's lief by determining one's capabilities and potential, shaping one's beliefs and values, and defining the importance and meaning of one's self.