Change In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi

In the novel Life of Pi, Pi changes throughout his adventure from India to Mexico. When Pi left India to go to Canada with his family, there was a tragic shipwreck with only five survivors: Pi; Richard Parker, the Bengal Tiger; an orangutan; zebra; and a hyena. Pi's changes at sea are emotional, physical, and mental, and these changes make him a different man when he washes ashore on Mexico.

The emotional change Pi experiences at sea make him a different man. Pi at the beginning of the novel is very emotional when the ship sinks at first, same as when he kills his first fish. Later in the novel he becomes less and less emotional though through to things. An example is when he says, "You may be astonished that in such a short period of

With Pi's lack of clothes he is more easily sun burned and gest many sores that are described as, "Salt-water boils-red, angry, disfiguring..." (192), this is one of the physical changes that Pi goes threw. Another physical change is when Pi becomes starved and dehydrated because there is little food on the boat and he is dehydrated because he can't drink the salt water. The being both malnutrition and dehydration causes Pi to change physically. These things are the cause of which changes Pi and makes him a different man physically after he washes ashore on

With the emotional and physical changes that Pi is experiencing, his mental change really starts to begin. When Pi shows less emotion it doesn’t just show his emotional change it all shows mentally that he is changing "from the weeping over the muffled killing of a flying fish to gleefully bludgeoning to death a dorado" (185), this is a link to Pi's mental change. When Pi suffers from malnutrition and dehydration it causes him to hallucinate which leads to Pi's mental change. At first Pi starts to have problems with his eyes, "The next day I started feeling a stinging in my eyes. I rubbed, but the itch wouldn’t go away... By noon, everything was pitch-black" (241). After loosing sight Pi has a hallucination. Pi hears a voice, "Is someone there?.. Of course someone's there" (242) and starts to have a conversation with this new stranger. The two start to talk about the foods that they wish they had to eat with Pi started off with dishes such as, "rice and sambar...spicy tamarind sambar..." (243) and naming other vegan dishes. The stranger then starts to name the dishes that he would like, "boiled beef tongue with a mustard sauce... calf's brains in a brown butter sauce..." (245) and a lot of non-vegan dishes. The strangers choices of meals makes Pi then thinks to himself, "I knew it. I wasn’t hearing voices.