Life Of Pi By Yann Martel: Character Analysis

We, as humans, often underestimate the fragility of our morals and “humanity”. In Life of Pi, author Yann Martel tells the story of a young boy named Pi who, after being shipwrecked and losing his entire family, must somehow survive in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a grown tiger for days on end by abandoning all the morals he once valued. Through Pi’s story, Martel shows how easily humans can become akin to animals when finding themselves in a desperate situation.
Through Pi’s starvation, Martel first shows that depriving a person of a basic need like food can drive people to beast-like ways in order to satisfy their urges. After being on the lifeboat with barely any food for more days than he could count, Pi decides to eat some of

his tiger companion’s feces and, upon catching some of it in a can, says, “I will be considered to have abandoned the last vestiges of humanness… when I say that it sounded to my ears like the music of a five-rupee coin dropped into a beggar's cup” (270). By comparing his joy upon receiving some of Richard Parker’s excrement to the joy of a beggar getting money, Pi is saying that he has gotten so desperate for food that he would gladly stoop to eating something no normal human would consider just to fill his needs. However, Pi sinks his absolute lowest after Richard Parker kills a blind man that Pi has a conversation with. After the man’s death, Pi admits, “driven by the extremity of my need and the madness to which it pushed me, I ate some of his flesh” (322). For humans, cannibalism is one of the worst taboos that someone can commit. Pi cannibalizing the blind man shows just how much of his humanity he is willing to sacrifice in order to survive.
Besides hunger, Martel demonstrates another situation in which humans can abandon all of their personal principles in favor of the less thought-demanding life of an animal as being when people are given something to hate. A hyena, a tiger, an orangutan, and a zebra also take refuge on the lifeboat that Pi gets stuck on. After the hyena kills the orangutan and eats it, Pi develops a strong loathing for the hyena. While watching the hyena, Pi becomes overwhelmed by anger and explains, “The only reason I didn’t stand up and beat it off the lifeboat with a stick was lack of strength and stick, not lack of heart” (171). For the peace-loving Pi to be not just willing, but eager to get violent with the hyena meant that hate and anger had overpowered Pi enough to cause him to forget the moral values that he once treasured so much. Once again, hatred consumes Pi in his second retelling of his story to the Japanese men. In this second story, the sunken ship’s cook murders Pi’s mother while Pi, his mother, and the cook are stuck on the lifeboat together. In a blind fury, Pi takes revenge by committing unspeakable deeds. He describes what he does to the cook, saying, “His blood soothed my chapped hands. His heart was a struggle- all those tubes that connected it. I managed to get it out. It tasted delicious, far better than turtle. I ate his liver. I cut off great pieces of flesh” (391). Here, Pi sinks to the lowest forms of savagery all because of his extreme hatred for the cook. Pi couldn’t have even imagined killing and cannibalizing the cook before his ordeal on the lifeboat, and yet he does it so easily when fueled by a strong enough hate.
Lastly, Life of Pi shows how a situation of paralyzing fear can cause a person to change into a creature running only on instincts and willing to do anything to survive.

When Pi discovers the tiger, Richard Parker, on the lifeboat after his ship sinks, Pi is horrified. In this panicked state, Pi mentions that he “...hatched several plans to get rid of him” (198). The Pi from before being introduced to this type of suffocating anxiety would have never even considered making another creature suffer, but by being cornered by both fear of death and terror of Richard Parker’s might, Pi can think only of how he can survive. Pi also begins to make rash decisions when he tries to tame Richard Parker out of fear of being killed. Pi takes a dangerous risk the first time he tries to tame Richard Parker, reflecting on the whole experience: “Richard Parker bared his teeth, rotated his ears full round, vomited a short guttural roar and charged. A great, full-clawed paw rose in the air and...sent me flying off the boat” (260). In this particular incident, Pi runs on his fear of death and attempts to do something that ends up putting him in even more danger. However, his decision-making skills had been greatly inhibited by his sense of trepidation and were replaced by pure instinct telling him that he had to do something dramatic to

survive.
It doesn’t take much for a person to forget what values they once had when they are stuck in a desperate situation. In Life of Pi, Pi struggles through the trials of starvation, hatred, and fear and does not come out without losing much of who he used to be. Like many other humans, Pi did not anticipate how easily his morals would shatter.