Exactly how
far can a human being possibly be pushed? Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi
pushes the protagonist, Piscine, “Pi”, Patel to his limits in this epic
survival story. Pi, a god-loving Indian boy raised in his parents’ zoo, lives a
colorful life filled with the animals of his childhood and multiple religions.
When the Prime Minister of India enacts martial law,
Piscine
starts his life off extremely connected to his principles. He is a devout
Christian, Muslim, and Hindu. He sticks strictly to his vegetarian diet and
pacifist lifestyle. He is quick to defend both his father’s zoo and his
religion(s). “I have heard nearly as much nonsense about zoos as I have about
God and Religion,” says Pi. He’s a thinker, analyzing everything he sees and
applying them to his beliefs. “The obsession with putting ourselves at the
centre of everything,” he says, “is the bane of not only theologians but also
of zoologists.” This thought comes from years growing up on a zoo, an
experience that, as you can see, has shaped his lifelong principles. Most
of the first section of the book is Pi’s reflection on the world around him,
lines like this: “To choose doubt as a
philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of
transportation,” demonstrate the depth of the roots of Pi’s philosophies in his
mind, the sheer frequency of these thoughts and the sureness with which he
demonstrates them makes it clear their importance. Pi is so connected to
his beliefs that he even defends his following multiple religions, without once
backing down, to his religious leaders and his imposing father. This behavior
illustrates how Pi keeps his faith and principles close to his heart. One would
never think that they could ever be stripped away, and yet Pi’s experience on
the lifeboat tells a different tale.
After
the ship sinks, Pi spends months and months stranded in the middle of the ocean
with only a live tiger for company. As you can probably guess, it’s difficult
to maintain practices such as vegetarianism when food and sanity are scarce. Pi
is broken when he kills his first fish. “I wept heartily over this poor little
deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a
killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy,
bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It’s a terrible burden
to carry. All sentient life is sacred. I never forget to include this fish in
my prayers." Pi’s reaction to his first hunt reveals how extreme
circumstances can make you do things you never would have done. Pi has been a
vegetarian his whole life, and here he was, killing a fish with his own hands
to eat. Eventually, he doesn’t bat an eye when killing a fish or a turtle.
Being a vegetarian was a significant part of Pi’s personality, linked both to
his religions and his childhood with animals. Vegetarianism is also linked to
his strict pacifism. After time passes, we see Pi beginning to strip all of his
previous practices away, as he says later, after killing a dorado, that “You may be astonished that in such a short period of
time I could go from weeping over the muffled killing of a flying fish to
gleefully bludgeoning to death a dorado. I could explain it by arguing that
profiting from a pitiful flying fish's navigational mistake made me shy and
sorrowful, while the excitement of actively capturing a great dorado made me
sanguinary and self-assured. But in point of fact the explanation lies
elsewhere. It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even
killing.” The fact that something so close to his heart can be stripped
away shows how events can change a human profoundly.
Throughout
this novel, the persistence of the human body and its willingness to survive is
shown thoroughly. The human body protects itself by hunting fish, retaining
water, and entertaining itself so as to not die from boredom. At the end of the
book, it is revealed that Pi probably made up his elaborate story about the
tiger and other animals in order to protect his mind from the stress of dealing
with the actions of the people the animals represent. Perhaps the stripping
away of disciplines that take lifetimes to build is only another method the
brain uses to assist itself to withstand stressful experiences. If you were
trying to, for example, maintain a peaceful and vegetarian lifestyle while
stranded in the middle of the ocean with nothing to eat but fish, you wouldn’t
last very long. Basic human instinct is to survive, and that instinct is so
strong that it surpasses things like tradition.
“It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you
let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did,
and your heart is heavy with remorse.”― Yann Martel, Life of Pi
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