Survival In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi

About Author

Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of Canadian parents. After studying philosophy at university, he worked odds jobs and travelled before turning to writing. In addition to Life of Pi, he is the author of the novels Self and Beatrice and Virgil, the stories The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and the collection of letters to the Prime Minister of Canada What is Stephen Harper Reading?. Yann Martel lives in Saskatchewan, Canada. Yann Martel is best known for his famous writing Life of Pi which won man booker prize in 2002.

Life of pi is one of the most extraordinary novels of recent times. It is a great adventure story of a sixteen year old boy who survived a shipwreck and was left alone with a Bengal tiger. After a

Pi was a vegetarian Hindu boy and animal lover. Use imagery and diction explore the theme of survival instincts throughout life of Pi. Pi is first afraid of harming animals, but later he is described as “butchering a dorado”, this shows his transformation due to his id. Pi use his shoe as bait for fishing and unfortunately loses the whole shoe and the bait. He had no other bait. He scolds himself. “Stupidity has a price. You should show more care and wisdom next time.” Pi finds himself without bait for catching fish until he discovers the flying fish. The flying fish was the reason he could catch fish and survive. He even struggled to kill flying fish but the desperation of keep going and to live was so great that when he caught a Dorado, Pi bludgeoned a Dorado to death. The need to stay alive was so great that it turned Pi from gentle, animal lover person into someone who thirsted for the blood of sea turtles. “Lord, to think 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.” “Butchering the turtle was hard work. My first one was a small hawksbill. it was its blood that tempted me, the “good, nutritious, salt-free drink” promised by the survival manual.” Pi is forced to eat meat and takes lives. Pi kills and eats quickly so that he can get his share before he has to give it up to Richard Parker. He has become like an animal. “It came as an unmistakable indication to me of how low I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal, that this noisy, frantic, unchewing wolfing-down of mine was exactly the way Richard Parker