Life Of Pi Setting English Literature Essay

Life of Pi is set against the tumultuous period of Indian history known as the Emergency. In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty of charges related to her 1971 election campaign and was ordered to resign. Instead-and in response to a rising tide of strikes and protests that were paralyzing the government-Gandhi declared a state of emergency, suspending constitutional rights and giving herself the power to rule by decree. The Emergency lasted for eighteen months and was officially ended in March 1977 when Gandhi called for a new round of elections. The historical legacy of the Emergency has been highly controversial: while civil liberties in this emerging democracy were severely curtailed and Gandhi’s political opponents found themselves jailed, abused, and tortured, India’s economy experienced a much-needed stabilization and growth. In Life of Pi, Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel’s father, a zookeeper in Pondicherry, India, grows nervous about the current political situation. Speculating that Gandhi might try to take over his zoo and faced with depressing economic conditions, Pi’s father decides to sell off his zoo animals and move his family to Canada, thus setting the main action of the novel into motion.

Though only a relatively brief section of Life of Pi is actually set in India, the country’s eclectic makeup is reflected throughout the novel. Pi is raised as a Hindu but as a young boy discovers both Christianity and Islam and decides to practice all three religions simultaneously. In the Author’s Note, an elderly Indian man describes the story of Pi as “a story that will make you believe in God,” and Life of Pi continuously grapples with questions of faith; as an adherent to the three most prominent religions in India, Pi provides a unique perspective on issues of Indian spirituality. India’s diverse culture is further reflected in Martel’s choice of Pondicherry as a setting. India was a British colony for nearly two hundred years, and consequently most of the nation has been deeply influenced by British culture. However, Pondicherry, a tiny city in southern India, was once the capital of French India and as such has retained a uniquely French flavor that sets it apart from the rest of the nation.

Life of Pi can be characterized as a postcolonial novel, because of its post-Independence Indian setting as well as its Canadian authorship. Like many postcolonial novels, such as those of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez, Life of Pi can also be classified as a work of magical realism, a literary genre in which fantastical elements-such as animals with human personalities or an island with cannibalistic trees-appear in an otherwise realistic setting. Martel’s novel could equally be described as a bildungsroman (a coming-of-age tale) or an adventure story. Life of Pi even flirts with nonfiction genres. The Author’s Note, for example, claims that the story of Piscine Molitor Patel is a true story that the author, Yann Martel, heard while backpacking through Pondicherry, and the novel, with its first-person narrator, is structured as a memoir. At the end of the novel, we are presented with interview transcripts, another genre of nonfiction writing. This mixing of fiction and nonfiction reflects the twist ending of the novel, in which the veracity of Pi’s fantastical story is called into doubt and the reader, like Pi’s Japanese interrogators, is forced to confront unsettling questions about the nature of truth itself.

Theme (Life of Pi-The Oldman and the Sea)

Many critics have noted the book’s resemblance to Ernest Hemingway’s novelThe Old Man and the Sea. Both novels feature an epic struggle between man and beast. In The Old Man and the Sea, a fisherman struggles to pull in a mighty marlin, while in Life of Pi, Pi and Richard Parker struggle for dominance on the lifeboat. Both the fisherman and Pi learn to respect their animal counterparts; each pair is connected in their mutual suffering, strength, and resolve. Although they are opponents, they are also partners, allies, even doubles. Furthermore, both novels emphasize the importance of endurance. Because death and destruction are inevitable, both novels present life as a choice between only two options: defeat or endurance until destruction. Enduring against all odds elevates both human characters to the status of heroes.

Theme (story telling)

Though just six pages long, the Author’s Note clues us into the book’s origins even as it blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. The note claims the text is nonfiction, placing this book squarely in the tradition of picaresque novels likeDon Quixote, which masquerade as fact even though they are obviously works of imagination. In picaresque novels, the harsh realities of life-poverty, illness, and so on-are subject to wry, ironic, and even humorous treatment. In Life of Pi, Martel uses his narrator to make serious commentary on everything from religion to politics, and the mock-journalistic introduction emphasizes the intersection of fact and fiction in his literary world.

The Author’s Note blends facts and fictions about Yann Martel’s own inspiration for the book to illustrate the central theme of the book: storytelling. Martel really had written two not-so-successful books before this one and inspiration had struck him during a visit to India. But did he really meet Francis Adirubasamy in a coffee shop, and does Pi Patel really exist? The answer is no. On one level, Martel is just doing what fiction writers do: creating an imaginary scenario to delight and entice his readers. But on another level, these opening six pages deftly lay the foundation for the novel’s central theme, which is that storytelling is a way to get around telling the boring or upsetting or uninteresting truth. Martel doesn’t want to say that this novel was created by painstakingly researching zoos and religions and oceanic survival guides, getting up early every morning, and writing for several hours a day. Such an explanation would poke a hole in the balloon of fantasy that Pi’s account inflates over the course of the next three hundred pages; so, instead, he invents a different origin story.

The Author’s Note is balanced structurally by Part Three, another short section that is also concerned with creating the impression that this entire book is a work of nonfiction. These bookends do not really fool the reader, of course, but they give us the ability to suspend our disbelief and invest ourselves more fully in the story we are about to read.

Though given only a brief mention, Pi’s reference of his thesis on sixteenth-century Kabbalist Isaac Luria’s cosmogony theory is very important to the book as a whole. In essence, Luria’s theory of creation states that God contracted to make room for the universe. This contraction, called Tsimstum, was followed by light, carried in five vessels. The vessels shattered, causing the sparks of light to sink into matter. God reordered them into five figures, which became the dimensions of our created reality. This seemingly unimportant detail actually foreshadows the main event to come: the sinking of the ship, the Tsimtsum,which gives Pi the room to create his own version of the events that follow. Interestingly, like the five figures that make up reality for Luria, five characters on the lifeboat (including Pi himself) shape Pi’s story.

The Will to Live

Life of Pi is a story about struggling to survive through seemingly insurmountable odds. The shipwrecked inhabitants of the little lifeboat don’t simply acquiesce to their fate: they actively fight against it. Pi abandons his lifelong vegetarianism and eats fish to sustain himself. Orange Juice, the peaceful orangutan, fights ferociously against the hyena. Even the severely wounded zebra battles to stay alive; his slow, painful struggle vividly illustrates the sheer strength of his life force. As Martel makes clear in his novel, living creatures will often do extraordinary, unexpected, and sometimes heroic things to survive. However, they will also do shameful and barbaric things if pressed. The hyena’s treachery and the blind Frenchman’s turn toward cannibalism show just how far creatures will go when faced with the possibility of extinction. At the end of the novel, when Pi raises the possibility that the fierce tiger, Richard Parker, is actually an aspect of his own personality, and that Pi himself is responsible for some of the horrific events he has narrated, the reader is forced to decide just what kinds of actions are acceptable in a life-or-death situation.

The Importance of Storytelling

Life of Pi is a story within a story within a story. The novel is framed by a (fictional) note from the author, Yann Martel, who describes how he first came to hear the fantastic tale of Piscine Molitor Patel. Within the framework of Martel’s narration is Pi’s fantastical first-person account of life on the open sea, which forms the bulk of the book. At the end of the novel, a transcript taken from an interrogation of Pi reveals the possible “true” story within that story: that there were no animals at all, and that Pi had spent those 227 days with other human survivors who all eventually perished, leaving only himself.

Pi, however, is not a liar: to him, the various versions of his story each contain a different kind of truth. One version may be factually true, but the other has an emotional or thematic truth that the other cannot approach. Throughout the novel, Pi expresses disdain for rationalists who only put their faith in “dry, yeastless factuality,” when stories-which can amaze and inspire listeners, and are bound to linger longer in the imagination-are, to him, infinitely superior.

Storytelling is also a means of survival. The “true” events of Pi’s sea voyage are too horrible to contemplate directly: any young boy would go insane if faced with the kinds of acts Pi (indirectly) tells his integrators he has witnessed. By recasting his account as an incredible tale about humanlike animals, Pi doesn’t have to face the true cruelty human beings are actually capable of. Similarly, by creating the character of Richard Parker, Pi can disavow the ferocious, violent side of his personality that allowed him to survive on the ocean. Even this is not, technically, a lie in Pi’s eyes. He believes that the tiger-like aspect of his nature and the civilized, human aspect stand in tense opposition and occasional partnership with one another, just as the boy Pi and the tiger Richard Parker are both enemies and allies.

The Nature of Religious Belief

Life of Pi begins with an old man in Pondicherry who tells the narrator, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” Storytelling and religious belief are two closely linked ideas in the novel. On a literal level, each of Pi’s three religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, come with its own set of tales and fables, which are used to spread the teachings and illustrate the beliefs of the faith. Pi enjoys the wealth of stories, but he also senses that, as Father Martin assured him was true of Christianity, each of these stories might simply be aspects of a greater, universal story about love.

Stories and religious beliefs are also linked in Life of Pi because Pi asserts that both require faith on the part of the listener or devotee. Surprisingly for such a religious boy, Pi admires atheists. To him, the important thing is to believe insomething, and Pi can appreciate an atheist’s ability to believe in the absence of God with no concrete proof of that absence. Pi has nothing but disdain, however, for agnostics, who claim that it is impossible to know either way, and who therefore refrain from making a definitive statement on the question of God. Pi sees this as evidence of a shameful lack of imagination. To him, agnostics who cannot make a leap of faith in either direction are like listeners who cannot appreciate the non-literal truth a fictional story might provide.

Motifs

Territorial Dominance

Though Martel’s text deals with the seemingly boundless nature of the sea, it also studies the strictness of boundaries, borders, and demarcations. The careful way in which Pi marks off his territory and differentiates it from Richard Parker’s is necessary for Pi’s survival. Animals are territorial creatures, as Pi notes: a family dog, for example, will guard its bed from intruders as if it were a lair. Tigers, as we learn from Richard Parker, are similarly territorial. They mark their space and define its boundaries carefully, establishing absolute dominance over every square inch of their area. To master Richard Parker, Pi must establish his control over certain zones in the lifeboat. He pours his urine over the tarp to designate a portion of the lifeboat as his territory, and he uses his whistle to ensure that Richard Parker stays within his designated space. The small size of the lifeboat and the relatively large size of its inhabitants make for a crowded vessel. In such a confined space, the demarcation of territory ensures a relatively peaceful relationship between man and beast. If Richard Parker is seen as an aspect of Pi’s own personality, the notion that a distinct boundary can be erected between the two represents Pi’s need to disavow the violent, animalistic side of his nature.

Hunger and Thirst

Unsurprisingly in a novel about a shipwrecked castaway, the characters in Life of Pi are continually fixated on food and water. Ironically, the lifeboat is surrounded by food and water; however, the salty water is undrinkable and the food is difficult to catch. Pi constantly struggles to land a fish or pull a turtle up over the side of the craft, just as he must steadily and consistently collect fresh drinking water using the solar stills. The repeated struggles against hunger and thirst illustrate the sharp difference between Pi’s former life and his current one on the boat. In urban towns such as Pondicherry, people are fed like animals in a zoo-they never have to expend much effort to obtain their sustenance. But on the open ocean, it is up to Pi to fend for himself. His transition from modern civilization to the more primitive existence on the open sea is marked by his attitudes toward fish: initially Pi, a vegetarian, is reluctant to kill and eat an animal. Only once the fish is lifeless, looking as it might in a market, does Pi feel better. As time goes on, Pi’s increasing comfort with eating meat signals his embrace of his new life.

Ritual

Throughout the novel, characters achieve comfort through the practice of rituals. Animals are creatures of habit, as Pi establishes early on when he notes that zookeepers can tell if something is wrong with their animals just by noticing changes in their daily routines. People, too, become wedded to their routines, even to the point of predictability, and grow troubled during times of change. While religious traditions are a prime example of ritual in this novel, there are numerous others. For instance, Pi’s mother wants to buy cigarettes before traveling to Canada, for fear that she won’t be able to find her particular brand in Winnipeg. And Pi is able to survive his oceanic ordeal largely because he creates a series of daily rituals to sustain him. Without rituals, routines, and habits, the novel implies, people feel uneasy and unmoored. Rituals give structure to abstract ideas and emotions-in other words, ritual is an alternate form of storytelling.

Symbols

Pi

Piscine Molitor Patel’s preferred moniker is more than just a shortened version of his given name. Indeed, the word Pi carries a host of relevant associations. It is a letter in the Greek alphabet that also contains alpha and omega, terms used in the book to denote dominant and submissive creatures. Pi is also an irrational mathematical number, used to calculate distance in a circle. Often shortened to 3.14, pi has so many decimal places that the human mind can’t accurately comprehend it, just as, the book argues, some realities are too difficult or troubling to face. These associations establish the character Pi as more than just a realistic protagonist; he also is an allegorical figure with multiple layers of meaning.

The Color Orange

In Life of Pi, the color orange symbolizes hope and survival. Just before the scene in which the Tsimtsum sinks, the narrator describes visiting the adult Pi at his home in Canada and meeting his family. Pi’s daughter, Usha, carries an orange cat. This moment assures the reader that the end of the story, if not happy, will not be a complete tragedy, since Pi is guaranteed to survive the catastrophe and father children of his own. The little orange cat recalls the big orange cat, Richard Parker, who helps Pi survive during his 227 days at sea. As the Tsimtsum sinks, Chinese crewmen give Pi a lifejacket with an orange whistle; on the boat, he finds an orange lifebuoy. The whistle, buoy, and tiger all help Pi survive, just as Orange Juice the orangutan provides a measure of emotional support that helps the boy maintain hope in the face of horrific tragedy.

 His full name performs two related and yet antithetical functions in the text: first, it emphasizes the idea that a very strong swimmer like Pi might realistically have survived in the ocean after a shipwreck; and second, it is such an odd name that is has the ring of allegory, positioning Pi as a mythic or fabled character. The literal, mathematic symbol pi, an almost impossibly long number whose combinations never repeat, also symbolizes Pi’s long journey, with all its variations.

3. Discuss the importance of believability in this novel.

Answer for Study Question 3 >>

Pi is a believer in the fullest sense of the word: he uses his rational intellect to take him as far as he can go and then he takes imaginative leaps. As Pi himself tells the two Japanese officials who interview him in Mexico, many things are difficult to believe, but we convince ourselves to do so nonetheless: “Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.” We give ourselves to these fictions, these variants on reality, because they give us a reason to keep going. Where is the joy in a life deprived of romance and passion? Where is the self-awareness in a life that is merely a biological accident? Where is the comfort in an existence that has no rhyme or reason? A life that is entirely rational or fact based is almost not worth living. To Pi, and to anyone who believes in things that he cannot necessarily see nor prove, faith is a bridge between the coldness of fact and the warmth of emotion. The ability to believe is a hallmark of consciousness and awareness, one reason religions are so fiercely protected and so widely practiced. To believe in something makes us feel more alive, more connected to the world around us, giving structure to our understanding of the universe and our place in it in a way that pure science, based solely on observation, never can.

Beyond serving as a foundational theme for the text, believability is integral to the very structure of the novel. Even as Pi asks us to believe his animal story, Martel asks us to believe the story he tells, of meeting Francis Adirubasamy and looking up Pi Patel in his Toronto phone book. We, the reader, know that these things did not really happen to Martel, yet we suspend our disbelief so as to become more wholly absorbed in the text. Martel’s fictional story far rivals the truth, which is likely that he had an idea, did his research, and then worked very hard for months and months to write his novel. That the novel begins with a supposedly nonfictional Author’s Note and ends with the transcript of an interview and the text of an official report establishes the larger message that all storytellers-both Pi and Martel included-require the audience’s trust, or belief.

Close

3. In light of the fact that this is a novel about imagination, why does Martel begin with the Author’s Note, which gives the impression that Pi’s account is truth, not fiction?

4. One of the ways that Pi keeps himself sane and occupied while alone in the middle of the ocean is by writing in his journal. What does his journaling say about the human need for communication?

5. The two Japanese officials who interview Pi don’t believe that he really landed on a man-eating island. When they say that carnivorous trees and fish-eating algae do not exist, Pi responds, “Only because you’ve never seen them.” What does this exchange say about human understanding of what is real and possible?

Why does Pi give two accounts of his ordeal? Which is the true story, and which one would you rather believe?

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Major Themes

Belief in God

Belief in God is clearly a major theme in Life of Pi, and has been the most controversial in reviews of the book. Throughout the novel, Pi makes his belief in and love of God clear-it is a love profound enough that he can transcend the classical divisions of religion, and worship as a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Pi, although amazed by the possibility of lacking this belief, still respects the atheist, because he sees him as a kind of believer. Pi’s vision of an atheist on his death bed makes it clear that he assumes the atheist’s form of belief is one in God, without his realizing it until the end. It is the agnostic that truly bothers Pi; the decision to doubt, to lack belief in anything, is to him inexcusable. This is underscored in that essential passage in the novel when Pi asks the Japanese officials which of his two stories they preferred-he sees no reason why they should not believe the better story.

Pi’s devotion to God is a prominent part of the novel; it becomes, however, much less prominent during his time aboard the lifeboat, when his physical needs come to dominate his spiritual ones. Pi never seems to doubt his belief in God while enduring his hardships, but he certainly focuses on it less. This in turn underscores the theme of the primacy of survival.

The Primacy of Survival

The primacy of survival is the definitive theme in the heart of the book, Pi’s time at sea. This theme is clear throughout his ordeal-he must eat meat, he must take life, two things which had always been anathema to him before his survival was at stake. Survival almost always trumps morality, even for a character like Pi, who is deeply principled and religious. When Pi tells the second version of his story to the Japanese men, this theme is highlighted even more vividly, because he parallels his survival instincts in the second story to Richard Parker in the first-it is he, when he must survive, who steals food, he who kills the Frenchman. If the first version of the story is seen as a fictionalized version of the second, the very fact that he divides himself from his brutal survival instinct shows the power of that instinct.

Storytelling

The act of storytelling and narration is a significant theme throughout Life of Pi, but particularly in the narrative frame. That Pi’s story is just that-a story-is emphasized throughout, with interjections from the author, Pi’s own references to it, and the complete retelling of the story for the Japanese officials. (This is not to mention chapter ninety-seven, which contains two words: “The story.”) By including a semi-fictional “Author’s Note,” Martel draws the reader’s attention to the fact that not only within the novel is Pi’s tale of survival at sea an unverified story, but the entire novel itself, and even the author’s note, usually trustworthy, is a work of fiction.

This is not to say that Martel intends the reader to read Life of Pi through a lens of disbelief or uncertainty; rather, he emphasizes the nature of the book as a story to show that one can choose to believe in it anyway, just as one can choose to believe in God-because it is preferable to not believing, it is “the better story.”

The Definition of Freedom

The true definition of freedom becomes a question early in Life of Pi, when Pi refutes the claims of people who think that zoos are cruel for restricting animals’ freedom. Pi offers evidence against this, questioning the very definition of freedom. An animal in the wild is “free” according to the opponents of zoos, and it is true that that animal is not restricted in its movement by a physical cage. It is, however, profoundly restricted by its survival needs and its instincts. If that animal is guided solely by its need for food, water, and shelter, is it really free? If it will never intentionally wander outside of the territory it has defined for itself, is it really free? In a zoo, where the animal’s needs are always provided, isn’t it more free?

The question of freedom arises again as Pi finds himself in a fight for survival at sea. He is without responsibility to anyone else, he is without any need to be anywhere in the world, he is perpetually in motion; yet he has probably never been less free, for he must always be putting his survival above all else. An example of this is that he can no longer choose to be a vegetarian-he must eat meat to stay alive. Throughout Life of Pi, the primacy of survival, of life, greatly restricts “freedom,” and thus redefines the very word.

The Relativity of Truth

The relativity of truth is not highlighted as a major theme in Life of Pi until the last part of the novel, when Pi retells the entire story to make it more plausible to the officials who are questioning him. He then asks the officials which story they liked better, since neither can be proven and neither affects the information they are searching for-how the ship sunk. This question implies that truth is not absolute; the officials can choose to believe whichever story they prefer, and that version becomes truth. Pi argues to the Japanese officials that there is invention in all “truths” and “facts,” because everyone is observing everything from their own perspective. There is no absolute truth.

Science and Religion

The theme of science and religion as not opposed but in concert with each other is present primarily in the framing of the narrative. It is exemplified in Pi’s dual major at the University of Toronto of Religion and Zoology, which he admits he sometimes gets mixed up, seeing the sloth that he studied as a reminder of God’s miracles. Similarly, Pi’s favorite teacher, Mr. Kumar, sees the zoo as the temple of his atheism. The theme of the connection between science and religion also is related to Pi’s respect for atheists, because he sees that they worship science as he worships God, which he believes is not so very different.

Loss of Innocence

The theme of loss of innocence in Life of Pi is closely related to the theme of the primacy of survival. Its significance is reflected in the geographic structure of the book-in Part 1, Pi is in Pondicherry, and there he is innocent. In Part 2, Pi is in the Pacific Ocean, and it is there that he loses his innocence. That Part 2 begins, not chronologically with the Tsimtsum sinking, but with Pi inviting Richard Parker onto the lifeboat, also reflects this, for it represents Pi reaching out for what Richard Parker symbolizes-his own survival instinct. And it is this survival instinct that is at the heart of Pi’s loss of innocence; it is this survival instinct that drives him to act in ways he never thought he could.

Throughout Part 2 there are other representative moments of a loss of innocence, besides the symbolic one of bringing Richard Parker onto the lifeboat. The most important of these is the death of the Frenchman, which Pi describes as killing a part of him which has never come back to life. That part can certainly be read as his 

In what ways does Pi parallel religious belief in God to the zoo?

Suggested Answer: The main parallel that Pi draws between these two things is the true freedom that both provide, even in seeming to restrict it. He says that detractors argue that zoos restrict animals’ freedom and so make them unhappy, and the rituals and rules of religion can similarly be said to restrict human freedom. Pi argues, however, that zoos, by providing an animal with its survival needs, in fact give that animal as much freedom, for it is content, safe, and wouldn’t want to leave. Similarly, the rules and ritual of religion in fact give people what Pi sees as their spiritual essentials, and thus a more significant kind of freedom.

Belief is a major theme in this novel. How are belief in God and belief in a story paralleled in Life of Pi?

Suggested Answer: Pi parallels the belief in God with the belief in a story by saying that everything in life is a story, because it is seen through a certain perspective, and thus altered by that perspective. If this is the case, he claims that something that doesn’t change factual existence and cannot be determined finally either way can be chosen. Given this, one can, and should, choose the better story, which Pi believes is the story-the life-that includes a belief in God.

If each character in Pi’s two stories are paralleled, Orange Juice to Pi’s mother, the hyena to the cook, the sailor to the zebra, and Pi to Richard Parker, what does the Pi in the first story represent?

Suggested Answer: While Richard Parker in the first story is paralleled to Pi, it can be said that he is paralleled to Pi’s survival instinct, while the Pi in the first story represents Pi’s spirituality and morality. In this way, Pi’s spirituality is able, with much hard work, to exert some control over his survival instinct-at least enough to remain in existence, even when not in control-while the survival instinct remains powerful and dangerous. Pi says that he would not have survived without Richard Parker, and this too is true in the parallel, for Pi’s spirituality and morality needed Pi’s survival instinct to keep his body alive, so that his spirituality could exist as well.

If each character in Pi’s two stories are paralleled, Orange Juice to Pi’s mother, the hyena to the cook, the sailor to the zebra, and Pi to Richard Parker, what does the Pi in the first story represent?

Suggested Answer: While Richard Parker in the first story is paralleled to Pi, it can be said that he is paralleled to Pi’s survival instinct, while the Pi in the first story represents Pi’s spirituality and morality. In this way, Pi’s spirituality is able, with much hard work, to exert some control over his survival instinct-at least enough to remain in existence, even when not in control-while the survival instinct remains powerful and dangerous. Pi says that he would not have survived without Richard Parker, and this too is true in the parallel, for Pi’s spirituality and morality needed Pi’s survival instinct to keep his body alive, so that his spirituality could exist as well.