Life of Pi Response I
In the novel, Life of Pi, taboos must be faced by Pi through his journey in life. Piscine Molitor Patel was named after a swimming pool. In literature swimming pools illustrates life with walls, like when you're little and you would hang on to the pool wall, always knowing where you were, but where Pi's journey takes place is anything but guided by any sort of direction. Pi's great journey takes place in the middle of the ocean. The ocean symbolizes the struggles and journey of life without guidance, because when you're stranded in the middle of ocean no one is there to guide you and while Pi is stranded in the ocean he must face many taboos of the American culture.
The first taboo that Pi must face is the pain and slow death of the zebra in the lifeboat. The zebra itself symbolizes a paradox with the white and intense black stripes as it is described by Pi, and with its broken leg from jumping over the side of the boat, hitting the boat so hard, testing the durability of its leg, the zebra implies the taboo of pain. Pain is hard to deal with for many people, which makes it a huge taboo in American culture.
As the zebra is attacked by the hyena and dies a slow death, which also implies death, and death is an even bigger taboo than pain. Death is a topic in which people try to avoid, and when talking about death people can become very uncomfortable, so talking about death is another major taboo in many cultures. In the scene where the zebra is attacked and dies slowly, Pi can barely deal with this, and he cries as he buries his head into his knees. Just talking about that scene of his life he feels uncomfortable continuing describing what had happened, just as many other people do too, which shows us that facing taboos is possible even if it makes s uncomfortable we can make it through. But death and pain are only the first of many more taboos that Pi will face in his journey as he struggles by himself with no walls to cling to for help.
Life of Pi Response II
In the beginning of our lives everything is handed to us by our parents; in literature this feeling of safety and security can be symbolized by a swimming pool. If a swimming pool represents this idea of parents giving everything to their children, then the ocean must represent the part of our lives when we don't rely on our parents anymore. Oceans have no walls, no boundaries to hold back danger, but swimming pools, they have walls, and boundaries. With this concept in mind I believe that Yann Martel meant with this quote, "I descended to a level of savagery I never imagined possible," (193) that Pi and every person will have to face savaging for their own things in life, even if they doubt their abilities humans have morality and with that they can do anything.
Alternative Realities
An essay response to Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Why do we need fiction? Some may say that we need fiction for entertainment and to look outside our existence, but for Piscine Molitor Patel it was a matter of escapism from his miserable reality and surviving on a small white boat in the middle of the ocean. In the novel, Life of Pi, the main character, Piscine, Pi for short, is faced with two hundred twenty-seven days of misery and the only thing that kept him alive was his fiction story about the animals on the life boat that replaced the people, making his life less wretched and bearable.
In the animal story, Pi replaces the actual, human characters that accompany him in the life boat with animals from the Tsim-Tsum. In this story he is able to hide the gruesome deaths and pain that the actual people endured with a fictional story of the animals, each animal symbolizing another person. Even though Pi is included in the fictional story as a person, he is represented by Richard Parker -- the giant Bengal tiger. Richard Parker is like another side of Pi, one that can sink to such a level of disparity, becoming capable of killing others, causing Pi to under some of the hardest things in life at such a young age.
One of the first horrible encounters Pi had was the slow death of the zebra, also known as the sailor, who broke his leg while jumping to safety in the life boat from the Tsim Tsum. After his leg had become badly infected, the cook, replaced by the hyena in the animal story, cut it off, allowing him to die a slow, painful death. Following the zebra's death, the hyena ate him, and after eating the zebra the hyena moved on to the orangutan, Orange Juice. Orange Juice was a loving, motherly orangutan representing Pi's mother. Losing you mother can be quite devastating especially if you witnessed her decapitation as she cried out in pain, which is another concept that can use fiction to escape a cruel reality. So after watching his mother and the sailor die it is only Pi, Richard Parker, and the hyena are left on the boat, though they are low on supplies. Richard Parker attacks the cook and kills him, which leaves only Pi and Richard Parker alone on the boat. Since Pi and Richard Parker are the same character, just different versions of each other, they create a paradox -- a minor theme throughout the novel -- on the life boat; Pi being a more mellow, less violent version, versus Richard Parker who does what he needs to in order to survive. With Pi creating this other version of himself to cover up the terrible things he had to do to live he is able to see past them, unlike a person not using a fiction reality to get away from their own misery who would become insane.
At one point of the novel, Pi stated, "[W]ithout Richard Parker I wouldn't be alive to tell you my story." (164) This quote is another example of using an alternative reality to survive. Pi created Richard Parker to distract him from his miseries, to provide an escape from the lonely world on the life boat. Richard Parker kept Pi alive; he gave Pi a way to sink to such levels of despair that did not cause as much harm to Pi's mental state because in Pi's eyes he saw Richard Parker to be a totally separate person than him even though he knew that Richard Parker wasn't real.
There was one scene that clearly shows how Pi survived with the help of Richard Parker; this scene was when Pi came across a Frenchman. Up until that point, Pi, had been managing well, but he had started to lose hope. He had lost his eye sight, drank the last of the water, and had been waiting to die when the Frenchman came upon him. Pi had been talking to Richard Parker, but really he was talking to his other personality. Richard Parker and Pi were talking about food when the mysterious man butted into the conversation. This man and Pi then started talking, which led Pi to invite him into the boat. One thing led to another and Pi found himself almost being killed by the Frenchman so he pushed him into Richard Parker's side of the boat, and Richard Parker ate most of him. This time Pi even had a little bit of him which lead to the returning of his eyesight. While talking to Richard Parker, Pi, was able to hold on for just a little bit longer, until the Frenchman came and was killed. The killing of the man was quite brutal since he fought back, but was no match for Richard Parker. After regaining his eyesight Pi saw the man on the other side of the boat and immediately was disgusted that Richard Parker had ripped him apart, but Richard Parker did what he had to do to survive.
Towards the end of the novel, Pi reaches a state of despair in which he loses all hope of survival. With this mental state Pi remarked, "The lower you are, the higher your mind will soar."(358) This quote was said as Pi's mind was in a desperate pursuit to escape his physical situation as his existence on the life boat began to be too much for him to handle; he starts to slip away, and his mind soars to its obligation of escaping reality through fiction in his animal story which hides his unbearable level of scavenging and pain of losing the real people in the boat. It also proves that at the lowest point possible in life -- which Pi was considering he was starving in the middle of the ocean on a life boat with a huge Bengal tiger onboard -- Pi reached for his last hopes for survival: faith and his creative imagination.
Living in an alternative reality can have its dangers, but for Pi it was the only way to survive. Death and pain are hard things to endure and to watch others endure, and with Pi's fiction animal story he was able to not think about the sailor dying slowly, his mother being decapitated, the cook who had gone crazy getting what he deserved, and most of all what he had done to survive. He teaches us that sometimes life is miserable and hard, and for the times that it is its okay to use a little imagination to escape from that reality.
