In the book, “Life of Pi”, the main character, Piscine, also known as Pi, goes through a harsh trial filled with impatience, fear, and only a speck of hope. He goes through the hero’s journey in which he learns how to live on the edge and makes up for everything that overwhelms his experience with the lifeboat. In his happenings of the surviving with the tiger, all of the horrible occurrences in the ocean and the island, and last of all the evil way his lifeboat partners died or were killed, Pi followed through with the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is a pattern of narrative identified by the American scholar Joseph Campbell that appears in drama, storytelling, myth, religious ritual, and psychological development. This helps us readers to analytically understand the book …show more content…
better.
The first step is the Ordinary World. This is where the adventure in the story hasn’t started yet and the main character is leading their “normal life”. Pi’s life is going through daily routine and nothing irregular or out of the norm has occurred. Pi is still in Pondicherry, his family owns the zoo, and his life is just confusing because of the religions he was learning about. The second step is the Call to Adventure. At this step,many would think that because the order has to go from left to right in the book that this step should be where Pi’s father decides to move to Canada because of political reasons. The hero’s journey is about Pi, not his family. Although it may confusing, you have to realize that the second step, the call to adventure starts when Pi is aboard the Tsimtsum. In the refusal of the call, he heard something happening on the deck and he didn’t want to get out of bed to do anything which tell us that he realized the problem and was trying to decide either to help or not. At first, he wants to do
nothing and let the others take care of whatever was happening, but later decided to do the right thing and be strong enough to not let himself drown because he was determined to save himself and live through it. Although in most journeys, there is a time where the character “meets a mentor”, but as the book reads, there is no one to help Pi on the lifeboat because he is all alone except for a tiger, and they really aren’t much help. The crossing of the threshold is when Pi realizes that from that moment on, things had changed from then on and everything would be a lot different. Pi even says, “Richard Parker, can you believe what has happened to us? Tell me it’s a bad dream. Tell me it’s not real.” (Martel 107) This is where Pi’s shipmates throw him off the boat because they were too scared. The “tests, allies, enemies” stage is when Pi realizes what has happened to him, the situation he’s in, what he has to work with to survive, and what problems have come up and he has to solve really soon. He has Richard Parker, an orangutan, a zebra, hyena, and himself to deal with. He has to deal with catching and killing fish for food, which is very emotional for him. And just in general, this stage is very important because Pi doesn’t really know what he’s doing, so he has to test things out, challenge after challenge occur(sun and heat, rain, hunger and thirst), and he just needs to stay away from Richard Parker until a plan is formed. The Approach finds Pi trying new things. He finds killing things not a big deal anymore because he says it’s for survival although it has become all very animalistic with his features. He also stops coming up on interesting things and has no way to keep his mind occupied when he is about to die of hunger or thirst. When he comes up on the Ordeal Stage, Pi finds something extraordinary, an island in the middle of the ocean based solely on water vegetation. There, he finds everything, food, water, shade,a place to sleep, and he is finally able to regain his strength back after being weakened in the lifeboat and sun for days on end. He is having a wonderful time catching up on all that he missed. After being there for maybe weeks, he realizes that this island feeds on the poor bodies of other shipwrecked souls and is cannibalistic. The agony of staying the perfect and creepy island or leaving to stay in a dingy lifeboat for who knows how long is tearing away at him. In the Reward stage, he leaves the island and thinks that everything will go downhill from there, and it actually does. He goes through the same experiences as before;starvation, thirst, and others. But, it gets better, he is saved! That was his reward. On the road back, it’s a short journey. He starts healing; physically and mentally. Everything is painful because he has to get used to normal life. Pi is the “resurrection hero” by going through the challenge of telling his inquisitors about his journey and they are bothering him about his stories he tells. The men have a choice to believe one of two stories Pi tells and they go with the less harsh, false story that plays along with the whole book. The Return with Elixir is his future with a wife, two children, pets, and a life that has brought him happiness. After all that had happened to him, he was still able through life and make it worthwhile, only learning from his experiences and taking from what he learned and applying that to his life today. The Hero’s journey may be a long one, but it very well explains the whole process of the book, “Life of Pi” and goes through the very important pieces in the book and every other piece of art written. When you take it step by step, you are literally taking apart the book to understand it analytically better. To understand it completely and fully, you must follow the path of “The Hero’s Journey”.
The first major step is a call to adventure. In this step, there’s something in the hero’s life that requires them to do something or go somewhere and take some type of action. Second, the hero must enter the unknown. This step sends the hero into a new world, entering something unfamiliar to the hero. By entering unfamiliar territory, whether it’s a place, an event never experiences, there are challenges and temptations the hero must face. With every new world comes new challenges. Dealing with new people or being alone.
In conclusion, this is why I believe the book “Life of PI” is a story about a hero’s journey in the book. Pi is thrown into the situation without doing anything wrong. Pi doesn’t deserve this, infact he is a bright and smart kid as mentioned in earlier pages from the book. You want Pi to live, mainly because Pi doesn’t deserve to die. This, in the end, is why I believe Pi’s journey of survival in the harsh Pacific Ocean is a hero’s journey type of
We all are heroes of our own story, and it is a quality seen in many movies and books. The hero's journey is about progress and passage. This journey involves a separation from the unknown, known world, and a series of phases the hero must go through . Each stage of the journey must be passed successfully if the person is to become a hero. In “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, the main character Amir faces a series of trials and goes through obstacles where the concept of his childhood dies. Amir's mother passes away during his birth, and his left with the suspicion that his father blames him for her death. Amir longes for his father's attention and approval, but does not receive any affection as a son. He grows up with his Hazara best friend, Hassan. In Afghanistan culture, Hazaras are considered lower class and inferiors in society. Amir describes his friendship with Hassan saying, “then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break." (20). Amir first refuses the call of action due to being afraid of the adventure ahead of him. Call to action is the very first step of the hero's journey, where the hero is disrupted and the
In the book Life of Pi Yann Martel tells the story of a man, Pi Patel, who survives a shipwreck and has to live on a lifeboat for months with a wild tiger named Richard Parker. Throughout the book, Pi struggles to survive on the lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. He had limited resources and had to deal with challenges, such as bad weather, and Richard Parker. Pi survived in the end, but it was because of his determination to survive throughout the whole journey. Yann Martel displays the theme that people must have the will to survive by his use of figurative language, such as similes, metaphor, and personification.
What is a hero? To our understanding, a hero is a person who is admired for great or brave acts. Joseph Campbell, an American mythologist, and writer wrote The Odyssey. In this novel he talks about The Heroes Journey which are twelve different stages of adventure known as the Ordinary World, the Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Meeting the Mentor, Crossing the Threshold, Test/Allies/Enemies, Approach to the Inmost Cave, Ordeal, Reward, the Road Back, Resurrection, and the Return With The Elixir. The Odyssey is about a legendary hero named Odysseus, who fought among the Greeks in the battle of Troy and went through the stages of The Heroes Journey. Odysseus lived in Ithaca, Northwest of Greece, with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.
Over the course of history the definition of what makes a hero has made many changes. Beowulf, Superman, and firefighters are all examples of heroes, but they are very different when broken down. Today’s society defines a hero by his values, his strength, and his journey.
In drastic situations, human psychology uses coping mechanisms to help them through it. In the novel, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Pi’s coping mechanism is his religions and his projection of Richard Parker. Martel’s Life of Pi shows how the projection of Richard Parker played a greater role in keeping Pi alive in comparison to his beliefs in his religions. During the period in which Pi was stranded on the lifeboat, Richard Parker kept Pi aware, helped Pi make the right decisions, and was Pi’s sub-consciousness.
When things are at their best prepare for the worst. That’s something I always told myself since I was young boy. Joseph Campbell was no stranger to this concept which he described as the hero’s journey. This journey had three stages: leaving the everyday world, overcoming trials and tribulations, and finally going back to the everyday world with newfound knowledge that you can share with people. I traveled through all three of these stages myself. This is my hero’s journey.
This alternate ending plays a key role in understanding how to view the novel through Freudian lenses. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis clarifies many troubling issues raised in the novel Life of Pi. Martel’s novel is about the journey of a young man being forced to test his limits in order to survive the unthinkable predicament of being lost at sea alongside an adult Bengal tiger. Life of Pi starts out by introducing an anonymous author on a quest to find his next big story and goes to a man by the name of Piscine Molitor Patel who supposedly has a story worth hearing. Patel begins his story talking about his childhood and the main events that shaped him such as his family’s zoo, the constant curiosity in religion he sought as a young boy and also how he got his nickname Pi.
On its surface, Martel’s Life of Pi proceeds as a far-fetched yet not completely unbelievable tale about a young Indian boy named Pi who survives after two hundred twenty-seven days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. It is an uplifting and entertaining story, with a few themes about companionship and survival sprinkled throughout. The ending, however, reveals a second story – a more realistic and dark account replacing the animals from the beginning with crude human counterparts. Suddenly, Life of Pi becomes more than an inspiring tale and transforms into a point to be made about rationality, faith, and how storytelling correlates the two. The point of the book is not for the reader to decide which story he or she thinks is true, but rather what story he or she thinks is the better story. In real life, this applies in a very similar way to common belief systems and religion. Whether or not God is real or a religion is true is not exactly the point, but rather whether someone chooses to believe so because it adds meaning and fulfillment to his or her life. Life of Pi is relevant to life in its demonstration of storytelling as a means of experiencing life through “the better story.”
As the reader examines the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel, the reader recognizes the similarities between the story of the animals and the factual story. The main character Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi, goes through many struggles once he is stuck on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean which are shown between both of his stories. Throughout the novel, Martel describes to the readers the relationships the Pi has between the animals in the story of animals and the real people in the factual story. In Life of Pi, Pi meets many different animals on his journey on the lifeboat that influence him in many ways, including the zebra, which represents the Taiwanese sailor; the hyena, which represents the chef; Orange Juice, the orangutan, which represents Pi’s mother; and the Royal Bengal tiger, Richard Parker, which represents Pi himself.
The Life of Pi, written by Yann Martel, is the story of a young man, Piscine, or Pi for short, who experiences unbelievable and unrealistic events, which are so unrealistic ambiguity is aroused amongst the reader. Duality reoccurs over the course of the novel through every aspect of Pi’s world view and is particularly seen in the two contradictory stories, which displays the brutal nature of the world. Martel wonderfully crafts and image of duality and skepticism though each story incorporated in this novel.
The novel, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, talks about a sixteen-year old man named Pi Patel, who unbelievably survives a dreadful shipwreck after 227 days with the animals in a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean. Different ideas and themes in the book can be found in which the readers can gain an understanding about. The author communicated to the reader by using an ample amount of symbolisms to talk about the themes. The main themes of this novel are religion and faith. His religion and him being faithful have helped him throughout the journey, and this eventually led to an incredible precedent.
Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” shows all three of the main elements of a hero’s journey: the departure, initiation and the return, helping the story to greatly resemble Joseph Campbell’s structure of a hero’s journey. Through the trials Pi has to face, he proves himself to be a true hero. He proves himself, not just while trapped on the lifeboat with Richard Parker, but also before the sinking of the Tsimtsum. His achievement to fulfill the heroic characteristics of Campbell’s model are evident as he goes though the three stages.
Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, is a fictional novel written in 2001 that explores the primacy of survival by employing symbolism, foreshadowing and motifs. This story follows the life of the protagonist, Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, as he embarks on his journey as a castaway. After boarding the Tsimtsum which carries Pi and his family along with a menagerie of animals, an abysmal storm capsizes the ship leaving Pi as the only survivor, though he is not alone. The great Bengal tiger, Richard Parker, also survives the shipwreck and during the 227 days that Pi and Richard Parker are stranded at sea together, the two must learn to coexist and trust one another for survival. Through Pi and Richard Parker’s struggles to remain alive, Martel explores the primal idea of survival by employing literary techniques.