Yann Martel’s Life of Pi

Life of Pi is so compelling to read and yet it is such difficult concept to truly understand. Yann Martel's novel, Life of Pi, is the about of Piscine Patel, who prefers it as Pi. At his age of sixteen, he survived for 227 days on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a hungry tiger to worry about. There were other inhabitants on the boat as well, a zebra, a hyena and an orangutan. Yann Martel is such a great author that he has masked one story over the other story though the work of Pi. Pi hides his second, true story by trying to give the people on the boat different appearances, in his devout triad of religions, and disembodying himself from his own thoughts. Pi hides his second story, in the first story, by trying to disembody himself from his own thoughts. To do so he had used physical look of Pi’s emotions, religion, and though circus acts.

The tiger in this story has a name, Richard Parker. This is from the help from a hunter whose name is Thirsty None Given. Pi spends quite a long time describing the origin of Richard Parker’s name. He also does the same with his own name. “[Mr. Chiba] ‘So the Taiwanese sailor is the zebra, his Mother is the orangutan, the cook is…the hyena…-which means he’s the tiger!’” (311) In the stories both the zebra and sailor fall from great heights. From this fall they had both broken they leg badly, the sailor had his bone protruding from his skin. As the zebra and sailor are suffering badly for most of the time they are shown, they are an inference that they represent Pi’s physical suffering as well as the heavy emotional toll that has happened to him though on the boat. In the first day the cook (hyena) had the idea to sever the leg at the broken bone a...

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... that he is battling is his own mind, Richard Parker. The mind and the soul coexist within a human. The mind needs the soul otherwise the mind would run amok and dominate the soul. While the soul needs the mind for bringing bodily comforts to people. “I trained him to jump through a hoop I made with thin branches. It was a simple routine of four jumps.” (274) Pi had trained his mind to understand what it can and cannot do in moral ways. He was doing this to balance out his soul’s power with his own mind’s power. He figures out how to train himself with his six plans. These six plans were almost all unrealistic in execution, but the sixth plan was to wait for Richard Parker to die by not giving him food or water, but Pi realizes that he may retaliate against Pi. There was a seventh plan which was to help Richard Parker, or his mind, to survive until the very end.