Comparing Life Of Pi And Jamrach's Menagerie

“If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf.”
-Russian proverb

Both Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and Carol Birch's Jamrach’s Menagerie, use many references to animals throughout, both comparing the protagonists to animals, animals having human like qualities; by doing this they question if to survive one has to sometimes has to resort back to animal instinct, but what if it is more than a choice, do times of survival, simply reveal what animalistic characteristics we have learned to suppress over thousands of years, we are always the wolf having to act like a human.

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Jaffy is constantly surrounded by bird references, cages, and feathers, throughout the novel he is transforms and changes but he always stays some type of a bird. Jaffy is the sparrow, found along Highway in shops, cage

each wing crushed against its fellows on either side..” (9), his life before he met Jamrach, crowded, in the loud, busy, smelly streets of the highway the tiger changed that, he ate that sparrow. Jaffy compares the tiger incident to a rebirth, a phoenix like resurrection, eaten alive, head on the sidewalk, died to be reborn. The sparrow that was killed became the magnificent parrot that sit on man’s shoulder, , restricted by man, not able to fly away, the parrot on Jamrach's shoulder. Like any bird trapped he longs to be free, this freedom for Jaffy is the boats. Being overwhelmed by freedom like any animal kept in captivity it’s whole life it was a struggle to survive, being pushed to the brink changing it’s very nature, eating its own kind. When he returns he has this need to have order to apply some sort of meaning. He describes himself as “ another sort of recluse” (Birch, 337), because he shut himself off from human but he stayed in connection with birds, he “tamed a jackdaw” (Birch,336) , he surrounded the rest of his life around birds and