Life of Pi

Life of PI is a book written by Yan Martel about a 16-year-old, Pi Patel, surviving a harrowing shipwreck with a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The novel commences with a narrative of Pi’s life before the shipwreck, bringing in some elements the writer utilizes later in the novel, such as religion. This is used to relate to the reader and emphasize the shipwreck events. Martel then proceeds to convey the horrendous events that Pi has had to live through after the shipwreck, such as finding himself on a boat with a Bengal tiger, starvation, and despondency.

The novel ends with Pi in a hospital bed in Mexico, explaining his story to two Ministry of Transport officials. He tells them his account of the story which we have just read and unsurprisingly, they are doubtful of the reliability of the story. After another conversation, Pi tells them a horrifying variation of the story, this time substituting the animals for people on the Tsimtsum (the ship which sank). We discover that these are the true events that had occurred, and Pi’s mind had replaced the more emotionally disturbing aspects to keep himself from insanity.

As we learn later in the novel, Yan Martel uses Richard Parker to represent Pi’s alter ego: the fierce, raw animalistic instinct, keeping him alert during his ordeal. “How low I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal, the way Richard Parker ate.” The Bengal tiger represents the innate instinct of a human being to survive and how even though Pi was human, he was no different than an animal when it came to his desperate situation. In this way, Martel sheds light on how humans often find animals' behavior despicable and cruel, even though humans themselves often behave in an animalistic way.

During the novel, when Pi tries to manipulate and train Richard Parker for his own safety, he conveys how fearful he is of the tiger and expresses his hatred for him, of the animalistic part of himself. This conveys how human beings will attempt to retain as much of their humanity as they can, to avoid giving in to the animal instinct (Richard Parker). "Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life" shows the deep, love-hate relationship between Pi and his alter ego. “Companion” connotes camaraderie, gratitude, love etc. The juxtaposition of companion and awful shows how divided Pi was because although Richard Parker (his alter ego) was cruel and fierce, he was grateful for him keeping him alert and therefore keeping him sharp during his suffering. “Disappeared forever from my life” marks the end of Pi’s story. “Forever” conveys the finality in PI’s words and how he will never see that side of himself again. Richard Parker leaving represents how his savage alter ego disappears when Pi is no longer in the desperate situation.

In the beginning, when Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with the animals, he is horror-struck by the way the hyena bites of the leg of an injured zebra and later murders the orangutan. As we learn later in the book, in the actual story, the orangutan represents his mother, the hyena is the ship’s cook, the zebra represents a wounded sailor. The fact that Pi decides to make an abstraction of these terrifying events and escape this horrifying reality by substituting the humans for animals, conveys the moral of the story which is choosing your own reality. He extremizes the situation to accentuate the moral. Yan Martel tries to convey how one can see a situation in many different ways and how humans have the right to imagine a better world for themselves if it means persevering and not giving up hope.