Life of Pi

The novel Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, and the short story “Miss Brill”, by Katherine Mansfield, appear to contain the same internal ideas. The strongest similarity between the stories are the characters. But that is also the strongest difference. PI and Miss Brill suffer from loneliness, misunderstood simple mindedness, and having to deal with others putting them down.
The characters of Miss Brill and Pi have a great deal in common. They both need to lie to themselves to adjust with their challenging times. When the rest of the world is going on without them, while they are deteriorating, and since neither of them can handle the truth and stay sane, they lie to themselves. But they get rude awakenings. Pi is not believed when questioned, so he makes his own truth. But the reader has a hard time knowing which story to believe. He knows what the real world wants to hear. Where as Miss Brill is content in her manners.
Miss Brill and Pi posses the ability to emotionally attach themselves to a fur and an animal. Miss Brill connects with a fur. She is so close to her fox fur, that she sees herself in it. It is just as old and useless as she is to the world. Except when she goes out on Sundays. It gives her comfort. It is her closest thing to a friend in the cruel world she lives her life in. Pi befriends a tiger. Richard Parker becomes Pi’s only companion. He was there through the good and the bad. All they had was each other for months. When he looses his friend, it seems to be more than he can bear. “I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because Richard Parker had left me…(...

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...rker, the tiger. But Miss Brill just walks away, goes home, and gives up. She is much more simpleminded than Pi. A stranger upsets her happy fantasy while Pi has had his family killed and is still living through the traumatic life experience of trying to survive the ocean. “It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I’ve made none the champion (123).” Pi also had to enjoy the company of a hungry, scaverous hyena. It ate away the zebra and killed the orangutan. But he did not give up. He keeps living his life. Finally, he gets a break when Richard Parker killed the cruel hyena. “Richard Parker’s jaws closed on the side of the hyena’s neck [...]. Its eyes went dull (150-151).”
As Pi is trying to get to the security of land and society, Miss Brill is trying to stay at the distance she is at.