Trauma In Pi, By Yann Martel

Trauma is a leading cause of many health-related problems in the world. Trauma is defined as a deeply distressing or disturbing experience or a physical injury. When an everyday person thinks of the word trauma, we do not necessarily think about the extreme cases, such as being involved in a mass shooting, being kidnapped, or being stuck on a boat with a tiger in the middle of the ocean. An everyday person would think of getting into a car accident, getting a concussion, or sustaining an injury. We tend to turn a blind eye to the extreme cases of trauma, but cannot hide the fact that these types of trauma exist and people are suffering from them daily. The outcomes of these traumatic experiences result in troubled people. Sometimes a person

This story is also argued to be the defense mechanism story, the story that Pi tells to cover up harsh realities of what actually happened within those 227 days on the boat. In the novel, written by Yann Martel, there is a scene where Pi comes across a carnivorous island. Pi being a vegetarian comes across this island named after a carnivore which is a meat eater, which leads the reader to believe it has some type of symbolic meaning. The island is full of green, from plants to trees to grass. It is also filled with lemurs everywhere (Martel 2001). The question at hand is, did Pi actually encounter this island or was he hallucinating and making it up? Perhaps, the island is named after carnivore to symbolize the killing and eating of the other people on the boat. This island is filled with everything green is to remind Pi of the vegetarianism that he had to let go of in order to survive. There is also another interaction in the novel. The interaction includes a man on another boat left out at sea. Pi and this man have a conversation about their situations. The man tells Pi that he cannot see him and Pi responds with I cannot see you myself. Pi could have physically gone blind or was hallucinating about interacting with this man. If these were in fact hallucinations, they would have been created due to Pi’s unconscious mind coming to the surface. This means he was beginning to go insane while on the lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. It also suggests that his mental health was deteriorating from minimal interactions with other humans and unhealthy living