LIFE OF PI
Spirituality
Man and the Natural World
The novel Life of Pi describes many different themes which are often pondered upon by humans. Although many different themes are present in the novel, listed below are four main ideas in the novel. It can be noted that most of the themes presented in the novel can be interconnected and are, in fact, related to one another.
THEMES
There is an interesting blurring of divisions between man and the natural world in Life of Pi. Human beings become more animalistic; animals become more human in both anthropomorphism and zoomorphism.
The novel warns against projecting human values onto the animal world. However, the novel also admits it is impossible to experience anything without a way-of-being.
Animals in a zoo, while essentially retaining their instincts, take on certain domestic, human-like traits . Human beings in the wild, while still retaining a few human traits, become more animalistic. Through this exchange human beings may learn a spiritual truth about themselves and the natural world.
The story Life of Pi begins with an old man in Pondicherry who tells the narrator, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” Storytelling and religious belief are two closely linked ideas in the novel.
On a literal level, each of Pi’s three religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, come with its own set of tales and fables, which are used to spread the teachings and illustrate the beliefs of the faith.
Pi enjoys the wealth of stories, but he also senses that, as Father Martin assured him was true of Christianity, each of these stories might simply be aspects of a greater, universal story about love. Stories and religious beliefs are also linked in Life of Pi because Pi asserts that both require faith on the part of the listener or devotee.
Life of Pi is a story about struggling to survive through seemingly insurmountable odds. The shipwrecked inhabitants of the little lifeboat don’t simply acquiesce to their fate: they actively fight against it.
Pi abandons his lifelong vegetarianism and eats fish to sustain himself. Orange Juice, the peaceful orangutan, fights ferociously against the hyena. Even the severely wounded zebra battles to stay alive; his slow, painful struggle vividly illustrates the sheer strength of his life force.
As Martel makes clear in his novel, living creatures will often do extraordinary, unexpected, and sometimes heroic things to survive. However, they will also do shameful and barbaric things if pressed. The hyena’s treachery and the blind Frenchman’s turn toward cannibalism show just how far creatures will go when faced with the possibility of extinction.
The battle with death that the protagonist in Life of Pi faces becomes very complex. Death is the thing he must push as far away from himself as possible. It is the thing that he fears and continues to ignore. Death is also part of life, and Pi, the protagonist begrudgingly admits this fact.
He seeks death. He runs away from death. By the end of the novel, our protagonist has had a very close relationship with death. It is the main thing that Pi struggles to overcome yet succumbs to in an everlasting cycle.
Living in unusual conditions and relying on survival instinct can render humans susceptible to the concerns of mortality. At times, characters in the novel like the hyena simply give up on life itself and mortality may be the key to their demise. At other instances, mortality may be the only factor that leads to one's survival.
The Will to Live
Mortality