Symbolism in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper

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Throughout the course of a novel, poem, or any literary piece, writers frequently hide symbols offering insight to the true meaning of their stories. Symbols appear as objects in nature, items in home, central ideas, or specific colors surrounding the main characters. The presence of symbolism in literature directly reflects the feelings or characteristics of the protagonist and any other major characters involved in the plot. When writers utilize color as a symbolic message, the colorful images ignite the reader’s inspiration to better understand the situation and state of mind of the character present in the scene. In the Indian novel Life of Pi, author Yann Martel portrays the ideas of hope, salvation, and life through the color orange. Although Pi’s situation looks grim as he spends 227 days aboard a lifeboat with a tiger, the color orange reenters the prospect of life and gives the reader hope that Pi will survive his strenuous endeavor at sea. In contrast, colors do not always bring positive emotions into a story; Charlotte Perkins Gilman taints her story a fading yellow hue in her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Her use of the color yellow attributes to the idea of the sickening and deteriorating mind of the protagonist in comparison the the fading and aging yellow wallpaper along the walls of her bedroom. Within the two pieces, each author applies symbolism through color and greatly affects the reader’s perception and feeling towards the stories.

In Martel’s Life of Pi, the color orange initially appears just before the scene in which the ship Tsimstum sinks into the Pacific Ocean. The narrator visits Pi and his family at their home in Canada and sees his daughter Usha holding an orange cat. This moment provides the re...

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...teristics. In Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, the author utilizes the color orange to represent hope that Pi survives his endeavor with a Bengal tiger at sea. Orange signifies life and ensures that Pi lives to tell his story. Throughout the course of events, the orange tiger aboard the lifeboat drives Pi to fight for his life. In contrast, the fading yellow color in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper steers the woman further into mental hysteria. Rather than leading to salvation, the aging yellow embodies her illness and leads to her ultimate demise. Whether a color provides positive or negative thoughts and emotions, any piece of literature remains incomplete without splashes of color throughout the text.

Works Cited

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Print.

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