Truly, literature has reached greater heights over time. From this relatively new form called magic realism to the classical beauty of mythology, our own cultures have been interconnected by the greatness of what literature is—and it all happens just beneath our eyes.

It isn’t fantasy. Neither is it full reality. What it is is the unreal fittingly placed into ordinary life, as if the reader is made to walk on an invisible wall that separates the outrageous fantasies of the imagination from the extraordinary events of the everyday. It’s the fusion of the make-believe into reality.

This literary genre’s charm is, in fact, what puts delight into Life of Pi, the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Yann Martel. It makes the reader wonder about the what's real and what's not: Can an Indian boy really survive the depths of the sea for 227 days with barely enough to get by? Can he have gone through as strange an experience as being in a deadly storm, living in a carnivorous island, or battling against wild flying fish?  What’s more, can he have done all this with a 450-pound Bengal tiger in the same boat? It all seems so plausible yet, at the same time, impossible.

Life of Pi blurs the limits of reality to allow the unbelievable to happen.

This however changed when he began to go through what is called the hero cycle—an element most stories share. It’s when he was called to this new adventure that magic realism started to color his otherwise normal life.

This color though wasn’t as bright as expected—in fact, it was dark and dreary. His calling came in the form of a storm, a strong one in fact. It was so strong that he was thrust into the unknown. However, he was not alone—he had a “helper” of sorts, and his name was Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger he and his family were transporting from the zoo.

He had no other human companion. Sure, he had temporary visitors in the form of orangutans, hyenas, sharks, flying fish and turtles, but they didn’t make life any easier. Being stranded on a lifeboat out in the sea,

surviving itself was a test he had to face.

However, his greatest ordeal probably was his experience on the carnivorous island, for it wasn't just a temporary but dangerous shelter but an "incarnation" of his own internal struggles, his own hopelessness. Just as how the island ate all that was on it in the darkness, his own despair was trying to take hold of him, and his decision of whether to leave it or not didn’t become a mere question of survival but of a deep personal struggle. In the end though, he chose to leave.

Eventually, he was able to return to safe land—to Mexico in fact,—and on his return, he gained boons of new life skills and lessons and a brand new story to tell—one that makes up the book. However, endings are bittersweet: on his arrival, Richard Parker, his longtime companion, decided to leave and disappear forever.

Undoubtedly, magic realism gave a fresh twist to what could have been a plain story of survival.

Literary critics and writers say magic realism began sometime in the 1920s when a critic was trying to describe a work of art. However, I believe that magic realism goes beyond that—back to the time of Romans and the Greeks.

Truly, what more of an example is there of magic realism than that of Greco-Roman mythology? It was reality infused with elements of the unbelievable.

They weren’t fashioned after the gods, but the gods were made in their own form. They had very human characteristics and very human flaws. Hera was always jealous; Zeus, unfaithful. Aphrodite was a lusty temptress and Hephaestus was just a very gifted blacksmith. They even set their stories in places almost truly accessible to them if not already existing. Magic realism wasn’t the first to merge the lines of reality and fantasy into something more believable because it was in fact mythology that first did it, and undoubtedly, it was through myth that magic realism was born.

Truly, the influence of Greco-Roman mythology has gone beyond decades and centuries.

Just in Life of Pi, for example, it seems to prevail not only in the concept of magic realism but also in that of the hero cycle. It’s as if all stories were made to follow what mythology has begun—with Life of Pi as no exclusion.

I believe that what has been established by mythology is just amazing. To think something rooted in a very archaic culture has spread all around the world just extends the meaning of the word influence to something far beyond what it is. What’s mind-boggling, perhaps, is how this influence isn’t even known to everyone—it happens just at the back of every head, of every imagination.

However, when seen from a greater perspective, it isn’t hard to believe that the unity is there and that, somehow, we are all connected to one another through these tales.