"Life of Pi" summary

[Daniel]

The book Life of Pi is about, an intelligence unusual zookeeper's son Pi. A student of religion and zoology, Pi is deeply fascinated by the behavior and personality of animals and people. Patel sets sail for Canada, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a lifeboat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain. The Life of Pi is a story of seven months at sea which is the main stage of the story. Pi is an unusual name it is from the French word for pool and, a pool Francis Adirubasamy his close family friend loved to swim. . Pi is also a letter in the Greek alphabet that is in the alpha and omega, terms used in the book to represent dominant and submissive creatures. Pi is also an irrational number 3.14 used to calculate mathematical distance in a circle.
Pi starts of from an older age, looking back at his younger life as a high school and college student in Canada, and then even goes back to his boyhood in Pondicherry. Pi suffers spiritually and finds comfort in religion and zoology. Francis Adirubasamy, a business associate of his father and a swimming champion, teaches him how to swim and gives him his unusual name. Pi’s father owns the Pondicherry Zoo, which teaches Pi and Ravi his brother, about the dangerous natural world of animals, one day his farther teaches, both of them, a lesson by feeding a live goat to a tiger before their young eyes. Life of Pi is a story within a story within a story, Pi recount life on the open sea, which started when his dad was motivated by India’s political strife. Pi’s parents decide to move to Canada; on June 21, 1977, they set sail in a cargo ship, along with a crew and many cages full of zoo creatures.
In the novel after the shipwreck, the characters are relentlessly preoccupied with food and water. As luck would have it, the lifeboat is surrounded by food and water in spite of the salty water, which is undrinkable, and the food, which needs skills to get and, difficult to catch. Pi persistently labors to land a fish or pull a turtle up over the side of the craft, as he must steadily and consistently collect fresh drinking water using the solar stills. The constant struggles against hunger and thirst shows the sharp adaptation between Pi’s former life and his current one on the boat. In Pondicherry, people are fed like animals in a zoo they never have to labor much to obtain their sustenance. However, on the open ocean, it is up to Pi to fend for himself. His adaptation from modern civilization to the primitive survival on the open sea is marked by his attitude towards fishing. Pi is a vegetarian, is reluctant to kill and he does not eat an animal unless it is lifeless. Pi does feel better but as time goes on, Pi’s increasing becomes comfort with eating meat he just caught.
Animals achieve comfort through practice of rituals and they are creatures of habit, Pi notes that zookeepers can tell if something is wrong with animals just by noticing changes in their daily routines. People are not that, different and they follow a routines, even to the point of predictability, and get anxious in times of change. Religious traditions are a prime example of ritual in this novel, for example, Pi’s mother wants to buy cigarettes before traveling to Canada, for fear that she will not be able to find her particular brand in Winnipeg, and Pi is able to survive his oceanic ordeal largely because he creates a series of daily rituals to survive. Rituals give structure to abstract ideas and emotions in other words; ritual is an alternate form of storytelling. We see the way in which Pi marks off his territory and differentiates it from Richard Parker’s is necessary for Pi’s survival. Animals are territorial creatures, as Pi notes: a family dog, for example, will guard its bed from intruders as if it were a lair. Tigers, are territorial they mark their space and define its boundaries, establishing absolute dominance over every square inch of their area. Richard Parker the tiger and Pi had to establish their control over certain zones in the lifeboat. He pours his urine over the tarp to designate a portion of the lifeboat as his territory, and he uses his whistle to ensure that Richard Parker stays within his designated space. The small size of the lifeboat and the relatively large size of its inhabitants make for a crowded vessel. In such a confined space, the demarcation of territory ensures a relatively peaceful relationship between man and beast.
The actual ordeal of Pi’s sea voyage are too dreadful to reflect frankly, anybody would have gone insane if faced with the kinds of experience Pi narrates to the ship investigators. These are two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport, who interview Pi, hoping to shed some light on the fate of the lost ship. Pi tells the first story about the animals, but it does not convince the skeptical men. After recounting his original story with the animals and the carnivorous island, the Japanese investigators are immediately skeptical and tell Pi, “Mr. Patel, we don’t believe your story” (Life of Pi, 99). So he tells it again, replacing the animals with humans: a starving cook instead of a hyena, a sailor instead of a zebra, and his mother instead of the primate. One of the officials notes that the two stories match and that the second is believable. Although in their final report, they commend Pi for living so long with an adult tiger. By recreating his story as an unbelievable tale about animals, Pi does not have to face the true brutality human beings are capable of. By inventing the character of Richard Parker the tiger, Pi can reject the fierce, violent side of his personality that allows him to live to tell the tale of the ocean, a lie in Pi’s eyes. He believes in the tiger-like features of his personality and the civil, human characteristics that stand in stressful opposition and rare partnership with one another, as Pi and the tiger Richard Parker are both allies and enemies.
Pi has been brought up a Hindu, then when he is trying to find his spirituality he discover Christianity, Islam, and chooses to practice all three religions at the same time.. His spiritual quest beings when an old man in Pondicherry says to him that , “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” religious and storytelling are two strongly connected ideas in the novel. Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, have there own stories and fables, which are used to spread the teachings and make faith believer which Pi enjoys. Stories and religious beliefs are also connected in Life of Pi because Pi claims that both need faith for the listener or worshipper. To him, the important thing is to believe in something, and surprisingly Pi admires atheists. He is amazed by an atheist’s ability to believe that there is no God with no specific proof of nonexistence. The agnostics, who maintain that it is not possible to know either and desist from making testimonies about God, Pi states they do not have faith and cannot believe in a fictional story.
Towards the end, a transcript taken from an investigators of Pi revealing the possibility of a true story within that story. There were no animals, and that Pi had spent those 227 days with human survivors who eventually died, leaving him as the only survivor. Pi story contains different kind of truth, one being literally true, and the other truth emotional. Throughout the novel, Pi conveys contempt for rationalists who only put their faith in factuality and pragmatism,” when stories astonish and inspire listeners, and are bound to linger longer in the mind are, to him, remarkably superior.
Journeys, whether physical, inner or imaginative, play a significant role in one’s learning and growth. The process and the change as a result, are more important than the actual destination of the journey itself. In particular, the imagination is a powerful tool that we possess, and through imagination, inspiration and speculation, it can lead to a change of perspective