Blog Post #8: Life of Pi- Creative Project

Text: Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Essence: Imagination and storytelling is essential in the struggle of survival.

Brief Summary of Text: The novel begins when the author encounters the story of Piscine Molitor Patel on a trip to India. Piscine himself then relays the story of how he as a young boy, self named Pi, grew up in a zoo with his family in Pondicherry, India. Extraordinarily, he adopts three religions, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, all at the same time. When he is sixteen, his father decides to move the family to Canada and on a ship crossing the Pacific, they travel with the zoo animals they are selling. A storm and an unidentified malfunction causes the ship to sink with the only survivors to be Pi, a wounded zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, all clinging to survival on the same lifeboat. The story follows the adventures and perils of Pi as he struggles to survive on the terrain of an seemingly endless blue ocean and as he confronts the problem of coexistence with Richard Parker. Eventually, after 227 days of wandering, he finds land and while being interrogated about the sinking of the ship, reveals a more realistic chain of events with the animals replaced by human beings.

Prompt: 2011B. In The Writing of Fiction (1925), novelist Edith Wharton states the following:

At every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation. Illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction, its vistas on infinity.

Choose a novel or play that you have studied and write a well-organized essay in which you describe an "illuminating" episode or moment and explain how it functions as a "casement," a window that opens onto the meaning of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.

Thesis: In Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the final scene where Pi Patel retells his story but replaces the animals present on the lifeboat with human survivors illuminates the conflict between factual truth and figurative truth. This clash exhibits the essentiality of imagination and storytelling in the struggle of survival.

Iceberg View of Culture: Rituals in the book that Pi follows help keep his sanity and give him great comfort. These include the religious routines and the daily schedules he made for himself to "keep [himself] busy" (190). The shallow and deep culture behind this include the definitions of insanity, patterns of handling emotions, and concept of "self". In Pi's self-created culture at sea, he associates insanity with lack of habits, of structure. He connects to his identity through the practice of prayer to avoid getting spiritually lost in the strange, sometimes sinister, situations he is thrust in. He also keeps his emotions in order by constantly using rituals as a way to mold what is abstract or ambiguous into a shape he is able to accept and comprehend. Though despair was often looming in the horizon as a "heavy blackness that let no light in or out", the darkness would be chased away and "God would remain, a shining point of light" and Pi "would go on loving" (209). This allows him to continue to believe in the metaphysical nature of his story.

Food is also a aspect of culture found in the book. Under the surface, food represents rules of conduct, relationships to animals, notions of leadership, and concept of "self". Compared to his former life in Pondicherry where Pi is a vegetarian and never has to worry about sustaining himself, everyday on the sea is a fight for food and water. Eventually Pi loses part of his innocence and humanity due to his effort to stay alive. He goes from weeping "heartily" over the "poor little deceased soul" of a fish to a violent hunter always in search of the next meal (184). Pi also uses food as a way to tame Richard Parker, to show who has the power in the situation, symbolizing his control over his savage, animalistic side.The difficulties food presents to Pi burden him with weight of realism as he strives to hold on to his idealistic story.

Creative Project and Explanation: An illustration depicting two eyes, one right and one left. The iris of each eye is filled with a scene showing one perspective of Pi's voyage.

In the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel, the meaning of Pi's remarkable journey was to convey the magic and wonder but also the vital necessity of imagination and storytelling in the struggle to survive. Faced with the harsh reality of having to survive alone on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific, Pi turned to his resplendent imagination to weave for himself a story of non-literal truth. The major story element of having to cope with living with a tiger is revealed to be an alter-ego Pi created for his savage, animalistic personality that surfaced due to the extreme conditions he was thrust in. By bending reality and being able to tell the "better story", Pi is able to survive 227 days as the last human survivor on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. The drawing of the two eyes embodies this message of dual truths, one factual and the other figurative. While one eye illustrates the amazement and joy Pi felt when he lifted himself out of his suffering through his storytelling skills to appreciate his awe-inspiring surroundings, the other shows the crude, hopeless reality of his existence and his descent into a primeval state in his fight for survival.

In the iris of the right eye, the marvel of a perfect day at sea for Pi is shown. Throughout the novel, Pi often describes these moments of wonderment and beauty in great detail, letting his imagination take him away as he loses himself in the scenery and not the hardships of the ocean. "[T]he sea is a city," Pi observes as he describes himself gazing down on "what Tokyo must look like at rush hour" (176). Not only does the mass explosion of life underwater take Pi's breath away, but also the magnificence of the sky. Musing that the stars shone so bright "it seemed absurd to call the night dark", Pi imagines falling out of Vishnu's mouth to behold the entire universe (177). The idealistic image of Pi and Richard Parker peacefully together in the lifeboat represents Pi's dual natures coexisting and cooperating together for his spiritual and physical survival, but also the distinct separation between the two characters. Pi refuses to acknowledge that his identity and Richard Parker's are one and the same. To make this contrast clear, he thoughtfully notes how Richard Parker's "brute strength meant only moral weakness" and compared to the strength in Pi's mind, "it was nothing" (122). Furthermore, the quixotic merging of the two skies reflects this perfect juxtaposition of Pi's two selves.

In the iris of the left eye, the flawless ocean scene is thrown into turmoil. The bitter reality is that life in Pi's lifeboat was awful. "Everything suffered," Pi lamented (238). The ocean below and the sky above were constantly his enemies, threatening to take away not only his life but also his spirit. "I felt even my soul had been corroded by salt," Pi admits, the physical suffering manifesting itself in his mental suffering (268). The foreboding sea and menacing sky surrounding Pi show how Pi was often confronted with this despair. The futility of being a castaway, of being "a point perpetually at the center of a circle", would be grasped by him over and over again (215). The other cruel truth is that there is no Richard Parker the tiger to keep Pi company, to help keep separate the two conflicting natures of Pi. Throughout the book, Pi struggles with maintaining his hold on his humanity and essentially his identity. "Something in me died then that has never come back to life," Pi quietly grieves after his devastating encounter with the Frenchman (255). "It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing," Pi says to explain the rapidity with which he became a ruthless hunter (185). The image of the tiger hovering above Pi demonstrates how the inner violent, savage nature of Pi has come out. The only way that this truth did not destroy Pi was because of his ability to tell the "better story".

The symmetry of the two eyes shows how one needs to be able to see through both frames of thinking in order to survive. While most people would emphasize the rational, reasoning view concerned with only "dry, yeast-less factuality", Yann Martel argues through Life of Pi that the imaginative, storytelling side is equally if not more important in one's will to live.