In the bildungsroman novel, Life of Pi, Yann Martel uses the experiences of the protagonist, Pi Patel, to broaden the reader’s awareness about the concept of reality and what is possible. Pi’s reality, for the first sixteen years of his life, is as a vegeterian boy living a comfortable life in Pondicherry, India. His family has money and standing in the community and Pi attends good schools in his neighbourhood. He has the freedom and desire to explore and practice three different religions simutaneously. Yann Martel explains in an interview with Sabine Sielke that when a person is immersed so completely in their reality they do not know there are other ways to experience life until something happens to change their current thinking ( pg. 18). While moving from India to Canada, Pi experiences a dramatic change in his reality, which alters how he thinks about his life, when the Japanese cargo ship, Tsimtsum, sinks and thrusts him into a world where he must leave all his comforts behind and embrace the life that lies before him. Pi learns that reality changes and when it does he must accept the new version and redefine it when neccessary.
Reality changes continuously. Current reality influences new technology, thinking and language in all aspects of life and in turn these things influence the current reality. For example, when scientists discovered the atom they thought they held the key to understanding what matter was made of and how the universe works. However, when scientists were able to see inside the atom they realized that it was made of even smaller particles which prompted the thought that there might even be something smaller inside those particles. The theories continue to grow and they will be altered as reality chan...
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...onform to one idea of reality would be impossible.
Works Cited
Digital Nation. Dir. Rachel Dretzin. Perf. Rachel Dretzin, Douglas Rushkoff. PBS, 2010. Film.
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi: a novel. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Print.
Moisse, Katie. "Rusty Knife Removed From Man's Head After Four Years - ABC News." ABCNews.com: Breaking News, Politics, World News, Good Morning America, Exclusive Interviews - ABC News. N.p., 18 Feb. 2011. Web. 10 Apr. 2011. .
Sielke, Sabine. "The Empathetic Imagination": An interview with Yann Martel." Canadian Literature 177 (2003): 12-32. Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 10 Apr. 2011.
“What is a Rainbow?” n.d. Retrieved from http://www.onlineschools.org/rainbow/
What is Reality? Dir. Shariatmadari, Helen. PBS, 2011. Film.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” -Philip K. Dick
The perciption of reality is different for everyone. For example, I think that reality is something that is well natured and enjoyable, and another may say that reality, for them, is something they have to work hard and suffer for. The film Matrix shows perception of reality through Neo and...
"Forms of life resemble what I call, 'realities'. Forms of life are always form of life forming. Realities are always realities becoming" (Mehan & Wood, Five Features of Reality, 65). What is Reality? Is reality what everyone believes in or does everyone have his or her own reality? Can your reality change what you believe in? Is reality a belief, or is it what you believe in your reality? Can your reality be right or wrong?
Pi, an irrational number, has never really been used to represent irrationality in a symbolistic manner in literature until it was cleverly paired with quite an irrational story in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. The book, published in 2012, takes place in India, Mexico, Canada, and in the Pacific, and is an astounding work of metaphors, hardship, and philosophical ideas about life and its irrationality. Perhaps pulling from his background of extensive travel and Philosophy degree, Martel creates an intricate and multilayered story that pushes readers to keep reading through all 319 pages despite a tying plot. Although the book is technically a work of fiction, Martel, clearly influenced by the realism genre of writing,
“You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Adapting to a new situation or experience like violent crashing waves can be difficult. Nevertheless, a person needs to learn how to surf in order to outlast the pounding waves. In a similar fashion, individuals need to learn how to adapt to a challenging situation in order to survive. This idea of the significance of adapting to new situations is often explored in literature. In the novel, Life of Pi, Yann Martel makes powerful use of character development to suggest that individuals may be able to adapt to situations in life through a sense of determination, or through denying reality and using their imagination instead.
I’m not going to pretend to know what reality is, but I know what I think it is, and what I think it should be. Reality should be what each and every one of us wants it to be. There should be no duplicate realities, just like there are no two snowflakes the same. What my reality is should never be the same as what your reality is. For each person has different, albeit special, beliefs. And these beliefs should be what, over the years, shape our reality to what it is. Not what somebody else says is going on, not what everyone else is doing, but what our heart says is real. It should not make a difference in my reality that some guy is running down the street naked. For that one man running down the street will never be able to do anything good for me, or bad against me. Even if a car hits that man my life should not change in anyway. What is in my heart is there, has always been there, and will always be there to hold my reality steadfast.
Reality is something that we humans have a hard time comprehending. We don’t know the exact reason why we live and why we exist but we have many theories that could be the reason. For example, Christians believe that God made the world in six days and that we live as his creations, to worship and adore him. Jose Luis Borges likes to conduct thought experiments with his stories and one theme he uses quite often is the nature of reality. Borges created a perplexing universe in “The Library of Babel” that plays with the idea of never being able to grasp certain concepts because of the limit of what one can perceive.
Religion is and always has been a sensitive topic. Some choose to acknowledge that there is a God and some choose to deny this fact to the death. For those who deny the presence of a higher being, “Life of Pi” will most likely change your thought process concerning this issue. Yann Martel’s, “Life of Pi”, is a compelling story that shows the importance of obtaining religion and faith. Piscine (Pi) Patel is both the protagonist and the narrator of Martell’s religious eye-opener who undergoes a chain effect of unbelievable catastrophes. Each of these catastrophic events leaving him religiously stronger because he knows that in order to endure what he has endured, there has got to be a God somewhere.
In his first voyage in 1492, when Christopher Columbus set out to search for Asia, he ended up landing in America on a small island in the Caribbean Sea, which he confidently thought was Asia. He then made several other voyages to the New World in search for riches, thinking that he was exploring an already explored land, but he had found the greatest riches of them all, undiscovered land, America. This shows that when one sets out on a mission, they face different challenges on the journey but in the end, achieve more than what they planned on achieving. The novel The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, and the novel Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, both describe two journeys where the characters achieve more when they learn about life, survival and patience, by understanding religion, tackling their fears, associating with nature, and encountering other characters from whom they learn something. The former is about a young shepherd named Santiago, who has a recurring dream of a treasure in Egypt, for which he makes a journey to achieve his “Personal Legend” by the help of a man who claims to be...
Society is known to put everyone and everything into roles that, if or when the role assigned is changed, all hell breaks loose. Through Freud’s theory, he explains the behaviors that are associated with the id, the ego, and the superego. Being that Pi was someone who had been relatively well-off prior to embarking on his trip to Canada and then thrown into a new scenario that involves him becoming a starving survivor of a boat wreck stuck in a boat with a tiger that is threatening to eat him, it can be seen that Freud’s theory is displayed. When observing the events that take place throughout Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, it is observable that he creates an impressive relationship between Freud’s theory of the id, ego, and superego and Pi’s mental facade while using a paradox within the specific animals, as well as his strive for survival.
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.”
The Life of Pi, written by Yann Martel, is the story of a young man, Piscine, or Pi for short, who experiences unbelievable and unrealistic events, which are so unrealistic ambiguity is aroused amongst the reader. Duality reoccurs over the course of the novel through every aspect of Pi’s world view and is particularly seen in the two contradictory stories, which displays the brutal nature of the world. Martel wonderfully crafts and image of duality and skepticism though each story incorporated in this novel.
A quick glance at Life of Pi and a reader may take away the idea that it is an easy read and a novel full of imagination, but take a Freudian view of the work and it transforms into a representation of the human psyche. Martel’s novel takes the reader on a journey with Pi as he struggles for his own survival. Pi experiences a breakdown of each component that makes up one's personality, according to Freud throughout the novel. One by one, ego and super ego both express a huge factor in Pi’s choices and emotions throughout his story. Readers are also introduced to an alternate ending to choose from.
Reality is the realest thing people can grab onto in this world. Reality is the way everything exists in this world and everything that goes with it. The actions and consequences from anything to anyone in this world is reality. The truth is reality is tough to deal with for people. Humans usually like to ignore the realities of this world, and continue to live in a twilight zone. This twilight zone is dangerous, because it can lead down a road of hurt and hate. When one is ignoring the reality, they will stop seeing the bad things. They will only see what they want to see. This happens in relationships all the time. A couple will start dating, when they clearly are not right for eachother. A person can want a relationship so bad that they will ignore the bad parts of a person just to be with them. Now this can be a good thing if you truly are in love. However if a person is dating someone ignoring the realities, they are going to end up getting hurt and left. Then the person who is hurt now has came back to reality, and realized
In drastic situations, human psychology uses coping mechanisms to help them through it. In the novel, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Pi’s coping mechanism is his religions and his projection of Richard Parker. Martel’s Life of Pi shows how the projection of Richard Parker played a greater role in keeping Pi alive in comparison to his beliefs in his religions. During the period in which Pi was stranded on the lifeboat, Richard Parker kept Pi aware, helped Pi make the right decisions, and was Pi’s sub-consciousness.