Life of Pi: A Multi-Generic novel.

7/27/2019 Life of Pi: A Multi-Generic novel.

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Life of Pi: A review.

:: Indranil Sarkar

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Life of Pi is the 4th novel of the Canadian writer Yann Martel (1963----).It

was published in 2001.The book brought him the Man Booker award in 2003. Martel was

inspired to write the story about sharing a lifeboat with a large cat (Tiger) after a ship

disaster in the Pacific Ocean. He conceived the idea after reading a review of the

novella Max and the Cats by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar. The hero, Pi or Piscine Patel, is

an Indian boy from Pondicherry. He has to pass 227 days in such a life and death condition.

I.S


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Life of Pi belongs to the category of an Adventure novel. It is one of the most

popular novels of the present time having already a sell of more than 10 million copies. Its

popularity has enormously been increased when it was made a movie by the famous film

director Ang Lee in 2012. The novel has also been translated in many languages including

French for which Martel has special likings. Martel once said, English is the language in

which I best express the subtlety of life. But I must say that French is the language closest to

my heart. And for this same reason, English gives me a drama by------- a sufficient distance

to write.

The French title of the book is L Histoire de Pi. However, behind the

overwhelming success of the book there lies a tragic story of rejection by as many as 5

London publishing Houses. The overwhelming success of the novel reminds us the


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publication history of Lord of the flies by the Nobel Laureate Golding. Lord of the flies

was rejected by 20 publishers before it was finally published.

.

Thanks to Knopf Canada, a Canadian publishing house for their dedicated service to support

new Canadian writers under the slogan "The New Face of Fiction". Otherwise the world

would have missed such a beautiful literature.


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Richard Parker, the 450 pound Royal Bengal Tiger

Martel uses so many queer ingredients to make his tale attractive. The plot of the novel is

divided into three parts and may be interpreted in just three sentences. - Life is a story...

You can choose your story... A story with God is the better story.

The book doesn't begin with Pi, but with an "Author's Note."This part is of only 6

pages length. Here, Martel says that he wanted to write a unique story but his initial

attempts failed and he was thrust in paramount misery. His first attempt to collect some real

life data from India failed. However, his second attempt bore positive results and he got the

opportunity to meet a man who told him the basics of Pis family but he advised the author

to meet Pi in person and collect the fretful story of his life from his own mouth. Accordingly,

the author met Pi in his residence in France and grasped the details of his life.

This section is simply non-fiction and resembles to a memoir. In the last sentence he says


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that he wants to speak Pi narrate his life-story himself; so that the readers may find it as an

autobiography.

Then the narrative begins. The novel is divided into three parts and altogether there

are 100 chapters.

In the Part-1 of the novel, we are told the family of Pi in Pondicherry and their Zoo.

We are told that Pis father decides to sell the Zoo and immigrate to France because of the

political turmoil in India in the 70s.The whole family gets boarded on a Japanese freight-ship

called The Tsimtsum. But, the plan completely fails when the ship sinks in the Pacific

Ocean. Ultimately Pi finds himself in a lifeboat with three animals.

Here begins the Part-2 of the story. Pi a middle aged man now. He narrates his unlucky sea-

adventure when the author met him in his residence in France. In the Part-3 of the novel, he

mentions the reaction of the two Japanese Police personnel in hearing his story. It is again, a

very brief narrative structured as dialogues and having the characteristics of a high pitched

drama. Of the three chapters, Ch-97 contains only two words: "The story" (3.97.1).

Thus the narrative contains various stylistic devices---memoir, biography, 1stperson

narrative, dramatic narration through dialogues etc. It is a blend of fiction and non-fiction as

well. It has a characteristic of meta-narrative. Like Arabian Nights there are several stories

bound together to the main thread. Like the peels of onion, it reveals one story after another

till we grasp the complete picture of the 227 days unlucky adventure of a young boy Pi.

The plot is not complex. The protagonist is an Indian from Pondicherry. He was

originally named Piscine Molitor Patel, as a tribute to the France swimming pool near their


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residence. But, he changed his name to Pi when he heard his French classmates teasing him

as Pissing Patel.

The story is divided into three parts. The first part is in flashback. Here the

middle-aged hero recollects his boyhood days in Pondicherry where the Patel family

maintained a Zoo. It was 1977. But his father sells the Zoo and decides to emigrate and settle

in France because of the chaotic political condition of the country at that time.

In the second part, the story of Pis fretful sea voyage to France is narrated.Pis

family was on board to a Japanese freighter The Tsimtsumthat was transporting animals

from their zoo to America. The ship sinks and he tries to save his life in a lifeboat. But in the

lifeboat there were a spotted hyena, an injured Grants Zebra and an Orangutan. Later the

Hyena kills the Zebra and the Orangutan. Very soon Pi learns that a Royal Bengal Tiger was

hiding under the boat's Tarpaulinin. It was a 450 pound Royal Bengal Tiger whose name

was wrongly interchanged with a human name of Richard Parker. Pi had to pass 227 days

with the Tiger as his sole companion before finally reaching the Mexican coast.

Pi describes the incidents of these dangerous 227 days in a very simple and lucid

manner. In order to save himself from Richard Parker he made a barrier between the animal


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and himself with whatever he had in that boat. Then he managed a peaceful coexistence with

the animal by providing it with food. He also assumed himself as an alfa animal in front of

the Tiger and tamed it with whipping. In one occasion he lost his eyesight and became

unable to manage food. In this regard it would be remembered that Pi was a vegetarian. In

another occasion he saved another man from a boat in similar condition with a hope of

getting a companion. He addressed him as Brother. But, the carnivorous Brother! tried to

eat him as soon as he got boarded in the boat of Pi. However, he was killed and devoured by

Richard Parker, instead. And his life was saved. Then in another occasion he became a victim

of delirium and imagined several imaginary things resembling S.T.Coleridges The ancient

Mariner. Ultimately he regained his eyesight and found an Island nearby. But landing at the

Island he found only carnivorous plants and as such returned to his boat again. Finally, he

managed to reach the coastal coast of Mexico. Smelling the land, Richard Parker jumped off

from the boat and immediately faded away into the forest without looking back.

The third part of the story narrates Pis discussion with two Japanese officers from

the ministry of Transport investigating the cause of the shipwreck. They met Pi in a hospital

in Mexico. Pi told the truth but the officers did not accept the story believable. Then Pi

invented a make-believe story. He told that he was on the boat with his mother, ships cook

and a broken legged Taiwanese sailor. The cook amputed the sailors leg as bait for catching

fish and then killed both the sailor and Pis mother. And then Pi h ad to kill him for self

defense.

The officials found parallels between the two stories and concluded that both the

stories narrated the same incidents. They interpreted that the hyena symbolized the cook, the

zebra the sailor, the orangutan Pi's mother, and the tiger Pi himself. At this Pi told that they


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may take either of the stories as true but none of them hold the cause of the shipwreck. The

officers took the story of the animals as true. Pi thanks them and pronounces the final

sentence of the narrative: "And so it goes with God."

The recent critique of the novel has revealed so many hidden post-modern

perspectives here.

We get an idea of Religion, in the truest sense of the term. This is because Pi tells that

he practices three religionHinduism, Islam and Christianity. We get more than one

philosophical connotation as well. Senseless and criminality in Indian political activities in

the 70s also could not elude the authors sight. It becomes a postcolonial novel, because it is

setting in the post-Independence Indian socio-political background and for its Canadian

authorship. It is a novel where the writer uses the style of magic-realism. Martel like Sir

Salmon Rushdie and Gabriel Garca Marquez uses fantastical elementssuch as animals

with human names or an island with cannibalistic trees under the backdrop an otherwise

realistic setting. It can also be described as a bildungsroman (a coming-of-age tale) or an

adventure story. Life of Pi even flirts with nonfiction genres. The Authors Note, for

example, claims that the story of Piscine Molitor Patel is a true story that the author, Yann

Martel, heard while backpacking through Pondicherry, and the novel, with its first-person

narrator, is structured as a memoir. At the end of the novel, we are presented with interview

transcripts, another genre of nonfiction writing. This mixing of fiction and nonfiction

reflects the twist ending of the novel, in which the veracity of Pis fantastical story is called

into doubt and the reader, like Pis Japanese interrogators, is forced to confront unsettling

questions about the nature of truth itself.


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Many critics have noted the books resemblance with Ernest Hemingways classic

novel Old Man and the Sea. Both novelsfeature an epic struggle between man and beast.

In The Old Man and the Sea, a fisherman struggles to pull in a mighty marlin, while in Life of

Pi, Pi and Richard Parker struggle for dominance on the lifeboat. Both the fisherman and Pi

learn to respect their animal counterparts; each pair is connected in their mutual suffering,

strength, and resolve. Although they are opponents, they are also partners, allies, even

doubles. Furthermore, both novels emphasize the importance of endurance. Because death

and destruction are inevitable, both novels present life as a choice between only two options:

defeat or endurance until destruction. Enduring against all odds elevates both the human

characters to the status of heroes.

We can close the book with the following quote from the book:Life will defend itself no matter

how small it is.

References; Links & Acknowledgements:-

1. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

2. www.wikipedia.org

3. www.imdb.com

4. www.goodreads.com

5. www.metacritic.com

6. www.readinggroupguides.com

7. www.creativecommons.org


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Life of Pi: A Multi-Generic novel.

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