What Is The Carnivorous Island In Life Of Pi

The movie Life of Pi, originally written by the novelist Yann Martel, takes the viewer through the dangerous journey that a young man, Pi, is put through. Pi lives in India with his family, until his father decides that the fighting between the Hindus and Muslims makes India an unfit place to live. Pi, his family, and the zoo animals board a Japanese ship to take them to their new home, heading east through the Pacific Ocean to Canada (World Map). A great storm hits, causing the ship to sink and a majority of the people and animals on board to die. Pi is one of the few to get off of the boat alive, having to leave his family trapped on board, ultimately leading to their deaths. Pi manages to make it on board of a life vessel, stranded with

Even after hearing different ideas of what the island might stand for, I believe that the island is symbolic for death. Even though the island appears to give hope for unfortunate victims that wind up there, it also has the potential to take the livelihood from anything that is foolish enough to fall for the island’s traps. The man who was on the island before Pi was one of the unlucky victims of the island, never finding civilization again. Even Pi admits that, “If I hadn’t discovered that tooth, I would have been lost, alone forever” (Life of Pi, Pi). This ties in with my view on the actual meaning of the island is, even though Pi does not directly say that he would die from the island, the island would make him dead to the rest of the world. Pi had to change his original schema, in thinking that the island was his savior, through accommodation. Pi did this by adjusting to the the realizations that he made about the potential death that the island would bring to him (Chapter 8 ‘Schema’