Title:
Life of Pi
Genre:
Fiction
Characters:
Piscine
Molitor Patel (Pi) -
The protagonist of the story. Piscine is the narrator for most of the novel,
and his account of his seven months at sea forms the bulk of the story. He gets
his unusual name from the French word for pool—and, more specifically, from a pool in Paris in
which a close family friend, Francis
Adirubasamy, loved to swim. A student of zoology and religion, Pi is deeply
intrigued by the habits and characteristics of animals and people.
Richard Parker -
The Royal Bengal tiger with whom Pi shares his lifeboat. His captor, Richard
Parker, named him Thirsty, but a shipping clerk made a mistake and reversed
their names. From then on, at the Pondicherry Zoo, he was known as Richard
Parker. Weighing 450 pounds
and about nine feet long, he kills the hyena on the lifeboat and the blind
cannibal. With Pi, however, Richard Parker acts as an omega, or submissive,
animal, respecting Pi’s dominance.
The Author - The narrator of the
(fictitious) Author’s Note, who inserts himself into the narrative at several
points throughout the text. Though the author who pens the Author’s Note never
identifies himself by name, there are many clues that indicate it is Yann
Martel himself, thinly disguised: he lives in Canada, has published two books,
and was inspired to write Pi’s life story during a trip to India.
Ravi -
Pi’s older brother. Ravi prefers sports to schoolwork and is quite popular. He
teases his younger brother mercilessly over his devotion to three religions.
Santosh Patel -
Pi’s father. He once owned a Madras hotel, but because of his deep interest in
animals decided to run the Pondicherry Zoo. A worrier by nature, he teaches his
sons not only to care for and control wild animals, but to fear them. Though
raised a Hindu, he is not religious and is puzzled by Pi’s adoption of numerous
religions. The difficult conditions in India lead him to move his family to
Canada.
Gita Patel - Pi’s beloved mother and
protector. A book lover, she encourages Pi to read widely. Raised Hindu with a
Baptist education, she does not subscribe to any religion and questions Pi’s
religious declarations. She speaks her mind, letting her husband know when she
disagrees with his parenting techniques. When Pi relates another version of his
story to his rescuers, she takes the place of Orange Juice on the lifeboat.
Father Martin -
The Catholic priest who introduces Pi to Christianity after Pi wanders into his
church. He preaches a message of love. He, the Muslim Mr. Kumar, and the Hindu
pandit disagree about whose religion Pi should practice.
The Hyena -
An ugly, intensely violent animal. He controls the lifeboat before Richard
Parker emerges.
The Zebra - A beautiful male Grant’s
zebra. He breaks his leg jumping into the lifeboat. The hyena torments him and
eats him alive.
Orange Juice - The maternal orangutan
that floats to the lifeboat on a raft of bananas. She suffers almost humanlike
bouts of loneliness and seasickness. When the hyena attacks her, she fights
back valiantly but is nonetheless killed and decapitated.
Tomohiro Okamoto -
An official from the Maritime Department of the Japanese Ministry of Transport,
who is investigating the sinking of the Japanese Tsimtsum. Along with his assistant, Atsuro Chiba,
Okamoto interviews Pi for three hours and is highly skeptical of his first
account.
Atsuro Chiba - Okamoto’s assistant.
Chiba is the more naïve and trusting of the two Japanese officials, and his
inexperience at conducting interviews gets on his superior’s nerves. Chiba
agrees with Pi that the version of his ordeal with animals is the better than
the one with people.
The Cook - The human counterpart to
the hyena in Pi’s second story. He is rude and violent and hoards food on the
lifeboat. After he kills the sailor and Pi’s mother, Pi stabs him and he dies.
The Sailor - The human counterpart to
the zebra in Pi’s second story. He is young, beautiful, and exotic. He speaks
only Chinese and is very sad and lonely in the lifeboat. He broke his leg
jumping off the ship, and it becomes infected. The cook cuts off the leg, and
the sailor dies slowly.
Setting:
1960-1977. Pondicherry, India; Pacific Ocean; Coast of Mexico: Canada
Plot:
Pi
Patel, an immigrant from Pondicherry in India living in Montreal, Canada, is approached by a local
novelist who has been referred to him by his "uncle" (a family
friend), believing that Pi's life story would make a great book. Pi relates an
extended tale:
His
parents had named him Piscine Molitor after a swimming pool in France.
He changes his name to "Pi" (the mathematical symbol,π)
when he begins secondary school,
even repeating numerous digits of pi, because he is tired of being taunted with
the nickname "Pissing Patel". His family owns a local zoo, and Pi
takes an interest in the animals, especially a Bengal tiger named Richard Parkerbecause of a clerical error. Pi tries
to feed the tiger, endangering himself to being attacked, and to teach him the
reality of the tiger's nature as a carnivore,
Pi's father forces him to witness it killing a goat. He is raised Hindu and vegetarian,
but at 12 years old, he is introduced to Christianity and then Islam, and starts to follow all three
religions as he "just wants to love God." When asked if he is also
Jewish, he replies that he lectures in Kabbalah at the
university.
When
Pi is 16, his father decides to close the zoo and move his family to Canada,
and sell the zoo animals, to ensure a good future for his children. They book
passage with their animals (to be sold in North America) on a Japanese
freighter named the Tsimtsum. On board the ship, Pi's father gets into an
argument with the ship's cook when he speaks to Pi's mother rudely. One night,
the ship encounters a heavy storm and begins to sink while Pi is on deck
marveling at the storm. He tries to find his family, but a crew member throws
him into a lifeboat; from the rough sea, he watches
helplessly as the ship sinks, killing his family and its crew.
After
the storm, Pi finds himself in the lifeboat with an injured zebra, and is joined by an orangutan who lost her offspring in the
shipwreck. A spotted hyena emerges from the tarp covering half of
the boat, and kills the zebra. To Pi's distress, the hyena also mortally wounds
the orangutan in a fight. Suddenly Richard Parker emerges from under the tarp,
and kills and eats the hyena.
Pi
finds emergency food and water rations on the boat. He builds a small raft of
flotation devices so that he can stay at a safe distance from the tiger.
Realizing that he must feed the tiger to protect himself, Pi begins fishing,
with some success. He also collects rain water for both to drink. At one point,
he makes a board ladder for the tiger to climb back into the boat after it had
jumped off to hunt fish. In a nighttime encounter with a breaching whale, Pi loses much of his supplies.
Faced with starvation, he eats raw fish. After many days at sea, Pi realizes
that he can no longer live on the tiny raft and trains the tiger Richard Parker
to accept him in the boat. He also realizes that caring for the tiger is
keeping him alive.
After
weeks longer at sea, near the end of their strength, they reach a floating
island of edible plants, supporting a forest, fresh water pools, and a large
population of meerkats. Both Pi and Richard Parker eat and drink freely and
regain strength. But at night the island transforms into a hostile environment,
with the fresh water turning acidic, digesting all the dead fish that died in
the pools. The tiger returns to the lifeboat at night, with the meerkats
sleeping in the trees. Pi finds a human tooth inside a plant flower and
concludes that the plants are carnivorous,
requiring them to leave the island.
The
lifeboat eventually reaches the coast of Mexico. Finally back on land, Richard Parker
stumbles away from Pi and stops at the edge of the jungle. Pi expects that the
tiger will turn toward him and acknowledge him, but instead he looks into the
jungle for a while and goes in. Pi, too weak to follow, lies in the sand. He is
rescued by a group who carry him to hospital, but he weeps that the tiger had
walked away without him.
In
hospital, insurance agents for the Japanese freighter come to hear
his account of the incident. They find his story unbelievable, and ask him to
tell them what "really" happened, if only for the credibility of
their report. He answers with a less fantastic but detailed account of sharing
the lifeboat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the cook. In this
story, the cook kills the sailor to use him as bait and food. In a later
struggle, Pi's mother pushes him to safety on a smaller raft, and the cook
stabs her as she falls overboard to the sharks. Later, Pi returns to grab the
knife and kills the cook.
In
the present, the writer notes parallels between the two stories: the orangutan
was Pi's mother, the zebra was the sailor, the hyena was the cook, and Richard
Parker, the tiger, was Pi himself. Pi asks him which story the writer prefers;
he chooses the one with the tiger because it "is the better story",
to which Pi responds, "And so it is with God". Glancing at a copy of
the insurance report, the writer notices a closing comment about the remarkable
feat of surviving 227 days at sea, especially with a tiger: the insurance
agents chose that story as well.
Theme:
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 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 story. 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 in something, 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 both 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.
Symbolism:
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 andomega, 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. The color of the tiger is orange Richard
Parker, who helps Pi survive during his227 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.
1. What does the title mean in relation to the
film as a whole?
The title, of course, refers to
our protagonist Pi, whose full name is Piscine Molitor Patel. Pi's name has a
few rich associations in the novel. For starters, there's π, the "elusive,
irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe" (1.5.41).
There's also the glorious Parisian swimming pool, the Piscine Molitor, which apparently made a lasting
impression on Pi's uncle, Mamaji. So far so good: a mysterious, mathematical
oddity and the favorite swimming pool of Pi's spiritual and aquatic guru. We
can put check marks next to most of the major themes.
Pi himself might not be immortal,
but his story is. In the title, the author reminds us both of the continuity of
life and the openness of Pi's story. Meaning, the story doesn't limit itself to
Pi. Ideas, people, religions – anything with the spark of life – all follow, to
some degree, the pattern of messiness and depravity and hope.
2. Among the characters, to whom can you relate
to?
Pi, for he has this strong faith in his religion and as for me I can
relate to that for we have the same faith in God although I believe only in one
religion. His perseverance and faith in God and in life inspire me most from
him. He never quits in life even if he knew that he’s close to death while he’s
with a tiger in a boat and doesn’t have an idea on what and where part of the
world they may be. He still hold on to his faith despite on the very hard
situation that he have during those 227 days. I can relate myself to him with
that because I know I was never really sure if where could life lead me through
but one thing that I’m sure of is that as long as I have faith in God my
struggles in life would easier for me to get on.
3. Which part of the presentation struck you the most? Why?
When the lifeboat makes landfall along the Mexican coast, where Pi and
Richard Parker are once again malnourished- as Pi collapses on the beach, he
watches Richard Parker disappear into the jungle without even glancing back.
My eyes are about to shed tears in this part of the movie. I even said
that “please look back” even I was just watching the movie and I’m not part of
it. It made me realize that in life even if we could have this relationship
with other people that some may just leave you behind and may not hold on to
what you have before. It’s just that we can never expect from someone to value
everything that you’ve been through.
4. What is the movie’s message?
Strong themes of the
power of faith, friendship, perseverance, and the ability to let go. As a boy,
Pi looks for meaning/comfort in many religions, ultimately embracing different
aspects of several of them. His faith is tested many times over the course of
the movie, but he holds tight to it. The idea that faith involves thinking and
questioning, rather than blind acceptance, is put forward. Pi and Richard
Parker develop a relationship that sustains both of them, unusual as it might
be.
5. Did I like this in general? Why?
Yes. For the story
reminds us about our faith in God and to the choices we have to make in life.
6. Did I agree with the main theme/purpose? Why or why not?
Yes. For it emphasizes
on how we could handle situations in life that could make or break us. It is
how we put our faith in God and how we interpret life.
7. What specifically did I like/dislike? Why?
Reflection
One of the ways in which Pi kept
his sanity was his habit of keeping a journal. By scribbling on a little
notebook, he thought through his experiences and was able to remain calm
despite his adverse circumstances. This routine also kept him busy when the
hours went by.
Being able to reflect is a key
virtue for all of us. While some of us may keep a diary or a blog, others may
want to simply take time off to ponder their encounters. Doing so allows us to analyze
our faults, purge our fears, and steel ourselves for the road ahead.
Religion
As a polytheist, Pi's beliefs
probably wouldn't gel with many of us. However, what was special about him was
that he had a strong set of universal morals - an anchor which kept him going
come hell and high water.
Having something to believe in is
critical in keeping us going during both good times and bad. It helps us to
weather the storms of life and provides comfort and guidance when we're afraid
or lost.
8. Are there any aspects of theme which are left
ambiguous at the end? Why?
Yes. Because the author left us a question that what story would you
prefer? (The story of the animals or the human story) it is left unanswered for
there are no wrong and correct answer it is for the viewers to make up to their
minds. It is how we interpret the story and reflect our lives into.
9. How does this film relate to the things that
are happening in your life?
The
story relates to me in the sense that I was holding on to this faith that God
do exist and I was a mere follower of Him. The struggles of Pi may literally
differ to what’s mine but it could be the same if we look deeper into the
story. The struggle to live in this cruel world and the struggle to seek for
answers about life.
