Vegetarian to Carnivore in the Life of Pi by Yann Martel

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.” (George Bernard Shaw). In Life of Pi, Yann Martel shows the change of pi beginning as a vegetarian and ending as a carnivore during his time on the boat. Pi’s experience on the boat interfered with his vegetarian diet, he learned that the only way to survive was to make major sacrifices.

Pi’s love for animals and his childhood life lead him to become a vegetarian. Pi grew up as a strict vegetarian, his parents and everyone he knew were vegetarian, to be fair, the whole region he lived in was vegetarian. If the society norm was being vegetarian, Pi would not have been any different from the rest. Pi never ate any sort of meat before in his life, the mere thought of him eating it made him feel nauseated. Therefore, only a life or death situation could change Pi from being a vegetarian. Lord, to think that I'm a strict vegetarian. To think that when I was a child I always shuddered when I snapped open a banana because it sounded to me like the breaking of an animal's neck. I descended to a level of savagery I never imagined possible. (Yann Martel, 249). Pi demonstrations how serious he was about his vegetarian belief by simply believing that he killed a banana and how hard it would be for him to even contemplate about eating meat. Hence, Pi reacted very solemnly when he killed the flying fish. Tears flowing down my cheeks, I egged myself on until I heard a cracking sound and I no longer felt any life fighting in my hands. I pulled back the folds of the blanket. The flying fish was dead. It was split open and bloody on one side of its head, at the level of the gills (231). Pi grieved for the fish as though it was his family. He shows how caring and serious his love for anim...

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...he amount of meat he has to eat. Accordingly, he even tried to eat feces to restrain himself from eating meat. I tried once to eat Richard Parker's feces. It happened early on, when my system hadn't learned yet to live with hunger and my imagination was still wildly searching for solutions (237). This shows his insane desperation to continue his vegetarian ways. In view of that, when he is older, Pi is a vegetarian once again. He serves the author spicy vegetarian food. Even after the many months of eating meat, he still shows he dedicated he is. Now as a grown man, Piscine is again a vegetarian and mostly likely to be that way for the rest of his life.

Change can have either a good or bad to it. People say that time can change a person but what allows this change to occur is themselves. “Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore.” (Franz Kafka)