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Pi's ordeal with Richard Parker |
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Life of Pi can be easily categorized as a magic realist novel owing to its believably unbelievable subject: a sixteen-year-old boy survives being shipwrecked and being stranded in mid-Pacific for 227 days with a Bengal tiger riding his same raft. Indeed, the novel is a blurring of the line between fantasy and reality: not only does Pi survive the sinking of the ship, but also does he survive not being eaten by the animal. When all the other animals had been devoured at some point in the novel, the boy—thanks to his inherited zookeeper’s domesticating skills, his capacity to protect himself for the tiger’s meals regularly (which in itself is miraculous: Pi unfailingly manages to get fish, even shark and turtle!), and his indestructible endurance—was left untouched by the tiger. Living dangerously near the point of being reduced to a tiger feed is actually marvelous taken as a matter of fact. |
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To illustrate: the boy, at risk of being devoured by the tiger when it finally gets hungry, thankfully catches fish and, at some incredible points, shark and turtle during mealtimes in the vast ocean. If God’s hands did not appear at these crucial moments, the life of Pi will be no more. In classical mythology as in the novel, divine intervention magically proceeds in order to resolve a major problem that threatens the plot to become self-destructive. In the larger aspects of literature and culture, deus ex machina figures as a human recording of a solid, unalterable relationship with the divine providence. God is always watching humans, ready to get involved in case of a need for some form of deliverance. |
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Pi Patel |
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Bengal Tiger |
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The magical realist in Life of Pi is influenced not only by the Modernismo Movement in Europe where renowned Latin American Writers like Gabriel Garcia Maquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, among others, did travelled, but also, in all probability, by the Greco-Roman mythology that is among the top influences in world literature and culture. The interweaving of magic in reality, something recognizable in such tales as the epic battle launched for the sake of the most beautiful woman in the world, the maritime adventure of a cunning warrior lost at sea for twenty years, the fatal self-adoration of a gorgeous boy being obsessed over by nymphs and the like, has already been mentioned. |
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The face that launched a thousand ships |
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Trojan War |
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Travel of Odysseus |
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The other classical influence is the deus ex machina or the intervention of the gods. The same divine meddling with human affairs evident in the taking sides of Zeus, Aphrodite and Hera toward either the Trojans or the Greeks, in the seemingly eternal wandering of Odysseus from sea to island and back again, in the transformation into an oak or a river to elude rape, for examples, may also be seen in the novel itself. |
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Divine Intervention |
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Daphne turned into an oak |
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Flying fish attacking Pi's boat. |
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Fish that Pi caught |
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The concepts of the Hero Cycle and the Monomyth may be fashioned in order to be visible in the Life of Pi. Protagonist Pi stands as the hero being called to an adventure, the departure of his family and zoo from Pondicherry to Canada by way of the Pacific. The one who helps him prepare for this adventure is his father himself, a zookeeper who is wise in taming animals. At the start of the journey, Pi is described as taking interest not in one or two but three religions—Hinduism, Christianity and Islam—all at the same time. The patience despite the taunting in his school (his real name Piscine is equated with “pissing”), the learned domestication of his father’s animals and the clinging toward his religions during his sea ordeal are the tests to improve Pi as a hero, meant to make him endure, wise and faithful. These qualities came in handy when the big problem to fix, staying alive while in the company of a carnivorous animal, was experienced by Pi. For struggling to survive, Pi received the reward of living through his sea adventure until such time he got rescued in Mexico, 227 days after his ship sank off faraway Manila. The repetition of the cycle is represented by the nostalgic storytelling of Pi of this ordeal years later in Canada, where the ship had headed to begin with. Pi’s following of this series of events in his life, from the departure from India up until the shipwreck, is a monomythic pattern being repeated in the cycle of telling the story. This cycle goes on and on every time the novel’s pages are read and Pi’s marvelous tale is being told yet again for the readers. |
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Realizing God’s intervention in human affairs and the epic quality of adventure in mythology made me feel and think that, in the case of the first realization, God is not a detached entity who never cares for me whether I live or die and, in the case of the second, that I can learn, grow and become more human out of any journey. Mythology has made me realize that whenever predicaments arise, God does not forsake me but instead, God helps me in my most trying times. Likewise, it has helped me realize that these predicaments I experience while going on with this adventure called life are meant to test my capacities for learning, maturation and humanity. |
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My close encounter with a ferocious tiger |
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Tiger at close range |
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Pi reaching an island |
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