Essay on Life Of Pi By Yann Martel

In Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, choices inundate the story. For Piscine Molitor Patel, Pi for short, there is the choice in which story he chooses to tell, faith he chooses to believe in and choice in what moral beliefs to abide by. As for the reader, choice is just as much present if not more, with the choice to decide whether the narrator is reliable or not, choice in the better story and choice in personal moral values. Yann Martel prefaces Life of Pi with a fictitious authors note, a make-believe author telling the story. It is within the author’s note, relating Pi’s survival to a story as a “story that will make you believe in God”, the notion of storytelling to explain tragic, the uncomfortable or mundane. Through storytelling, the conflicts between reason and imagination, humans and animals, love and brutality arise, blurring the means of survival, demanding faith to be questioned; instincts require reevaluation and what can be gained in grief. It is only in the last chapter, that two stories unfold. The first story that is told, the better story, is one filled with dream, imagination, fantasy, mystery and “the spark of life” a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Pi’s pacific journey on a lifeboat consists not only of a tiger but also a zebra, a hyena, and an orangutan. This is story is difficult for the Japanese men interviewing Pi at the end to believe and therefore Pi tells a second story allegorically substituting the animals for people, a French cook, a Taiwanese…