Comparing Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Lord of the Flies by William Golding

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Life of Pi is a fictitious adventure novel published and copyrighted in 2001. Life of Pi was written by Yann Martel. Yann Martel has won multiple prizes for his writing, including the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2001. He also won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in 2001-2003. Life of Pi was produced and made into a movie in 2012.
The novel has two sides to it, one being the story as it is being told by the narrator, and the other by the man the narrator is telling the story to. The majority of the book is the story being told by the narrator, but it is frequently interrupted by the listener. The listener describes his surroundings, the narrator's home. This tells the readers that the story being told is not in present time, and that the main character of the story, Piscine Patel, survives his ordeal and lives a quiet happy life with his wife and children in Canada.
The novel starts out with the narrator, Piscine, telling stories about his childhood. He talked about school and how he came to have the nickname of Pi. The majority of these stories take place in his father's zoo in the city of Pondicherry, India. He tells multiple stories about the different animals within the zoo and he speaks about their many different behaviors and tendencies. He talks about how man doesn't always understand the animals. Pi also tells stories about how he comes to worship three different major religions of the world, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. He talks about how as a boy he encountered these religions and decided that he wanted to be a part of all three of them. He tells different stories of the religions, giving the reader an insight as to what these religions are and what they are founded on. For example, he tell...

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...l. Both novels feature young boys as their main characters. They both capture a sense of solitude for the characters and how they are going to live. Both novels carry a similar theme about human instincts and how these instincts will influence people, but that these instincts are also important. A couple differences include the amount of characters in the novel. In Lord of the Flies there are several characters that play important roles and are very prevalent throughout the whole book, whereas Life of Pi is a story mostly focused on one character. The way the stories are told is different, Life of Pi takes on a few different forms of narration, whereas Lord of the Flies is told almost entirely from an anonymous third person view. I would say that these two novels definitely have more in common than they do differences, and they are both great works of literature.

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