wassup everyone! LOL
This is an essay I completed earlier, and just wanted some advise as to where to improve and what not!
Cheers ya'll
‘Doesn’t the telling of something always become a story?’ (302) Why is it that Yann Martel gives the reader two versions of how Pi survived?
‘Life of Pi’ is an example of a contemporarily-styled narrative, exploring many themes, in a story-within-a-story structure that gives a postmodern feel to the illustration of the brutality of nature, and the resilience of human spirit. This is not, however, only an adventure narrative and contains many elements associated with exploratory storytelling. Yann Martel gives the reader a choice of preference between two versions of what took place; one of imagination and wonder and the other being of fact and reason. The first told in length, is the one of imagination, in which Pi is on the lifeboat with an array of zoo animals. The second version is similar but instead has humans, not animals, accompanying Pi. Martel creates juxtaposition between the two stories with the various characters representing human counterparts in the second version. Yann Martel tells these two different versions of the same story to overcome the monotony that a story of factual and logical events creates. Martel gives the reader two versions of how Pi survived in order to compel us to ponder over the similarities of human and animal nature as well as challenge the reader’s ability to imagine what is possible.
It is inevitable that a compelling and credible story must contain at least one or more themes. A theme can be almost anything, but the most famous and long-lived stories of civilization have centred around very fundamental themes that are both relatable and compelling. ‘Life of Pi’ contains a broad range of themes: religion and faith, human and animal nature and survival, all fundamental aspects of humanity and life on this Earth. Yann Martel is able to combine these primary themes within an adventure story in the form of a fable, about a coming-of-age story-within-a-story; not exactly an easy task. The way in which good stories are told is incredibly debatable, but a common perception is, that by highlighting the key events that adequately display the prominent themes, an efficient way in which to illustrate and accentuate the main point of the story is achievable. Martel is obviously very interested in good storytelling and how it comes about. “I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example – I wonder – could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less?” There was a film director who once said that “if a gun is shown at the start of a film, it must be fired by the end of it”, this is indicative of motifs in film but comparatively it explains how nothing is written or shown without purpose, in a book or film. All the chapters of Life of Pi were able to combine in order to portray the entirety of the tale, every detail of the story is relevant and compliments one or more of the various themes of the story. Themes are used as a way of relating to the audience, or in this case, the reader. The telling of something may not always become a story but with the inclusion of relatable themes, that something is much more likely to be considered a credible story.
Yann Martel details how Pi offers two related stories that have similar outcomes, but are different in the methods of which they come to that end. The first story that Pi tells makes up the majority of the book; part two, in which Pi is trapped on the lifeboat with only animals, including Richard Parker. In the second story that he offers to the Japanese maritime officials, after they say that they don’t believe his first story, he confesses he was trapped on the lifeboat with other people, including his own mother. The first story is much less believable (not taking away from the fact that the second would not be incredible if it were true) and it is understandable how the Japanese officials would have been sceptical. When Pi asks them “which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without the animals” they both agree that the first one with the animals is a better story, but why? Most survival stories are believable as they are set in real situations such as the World Trade Centre attacks for example, and are in most cases astonishing and captivating. Adding an imaginative aspect to that kind of story seems to be able to heighten the quality of the story, as it does seem factual and relevant to many a theme but at the same time, is almost inconceivable. Take for example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm; just like Life of Pi, Animal Farm can theoretically be said to be a true story told through imaginative means. In Animal Farm the animals are ordinary livestock and farm animals and represent the ordinary Russian people that would take action against a tyranny. Similarly, in Life of Pi, the animals on the raft are directly representative of the people in the ‘logical’ story. These contrasts are what make these stories much more interesting than a straight telling of a factual story and it is what made the Japanese officials like the story with the animals more than the one without. By using animals as representing humans, Pi and Orwell are illustrating the instinctual nature that resides within each and every one of us, whether that be as caring as a mother orang-utan or as greedy as a pig.
Yann Martel offers alternate stories of the same outcome in order to show how subjective perception can alter what one considers to be reality. Martel allows Pi to have a fabricated story of animals and a carnivorous island, as opposed to a story of humans and no island, in order to adequately demonstrate a personal feeling of what it truly was like for Pi to experience 227 days at sea. “The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?” Pi is not only describing subjective perception and interpretation but is drawing upon his own experiences, the first story, in which to illustrate how our understanding of the world creates a story. In all manner of fact, assuming that the story is true, the second, more logical version is much more likely to have detailed the actual events. However, to escape what is a brutal story about the death of his family and his suffering, he alters the facts of the true story to reflect what he really perceives. This is pinpointing the way in which perception alters reality in order to suit the perceiver’s desires. Denial is an example of how one might perceive something one way, yet subconsciously alter the facts of what they perceived, if what is offered as reality is, as in Pi’s case, unbearable. In terms of quality of representation, the straight facts of a story illustrate only what happened; while an alternate representation telling the same story with an imaginative reality will detail what happens by use of metaphors or symbolism but also express the feelings of the perceiver. While it may not be possible, the existence of a carnivorous island inhabited by meerkats is most likely symbolic of Pi’s state of mind or feelings at that particular point in the journey. He may have found an island, it may have not been carnivorous or inhabited by meerkats but they may have been how he felt about it. The carnivorous part may be representative of how Pi initially felt about the island; the island was desolate and very foreign to him, much like the eating of flesh. The meerkats may have been all of the wildlife he saw in his time on the island and indicate how he felt about their vulnerability and lack of knowledge concerning the outside world. The fact that he perceived them as meerkats may simply be a heightening of the absurdity of there being life on such a desolate island at all. “He had confirmed what I had suspected, that these meerkats had gone for so many generations without predators that any notion of flight distance, of flight, of plain fear, had been genetically weeded out of them.” This quote may even be a personal theorisation by Martel himself, in which a particular being or beings can be isolated for so long that they lose the understanding of basic notions such as a predator, or God. Which generates the question: are they truly alive?
Martel gives the two versions of Pi’s survival in order to emphasise the similarities between human and animal nature, as well as to illustrate subjective perception and alternate realities he also wants to compel the reader to imagine, not only what isn’t possible but, what is possible. Most importantly, he wants to demonstrate the good quality that an emotionally symbolic story has over a factual one. Life of Pi contains many fundamental and highly relatable themes that combine together to create a very orderly and purposeful story. The added imagination of the contrast that Martel creates between the two stories is showing his belief in the closely-related natures of humans and animals. Martel is able to bring across his own view of how subjective perception is able to heighten and distort reality in order to make it our own. It can be said that a lot of what happened in the first version may be symbolic to actual events that took place on the voyage and this creates an imaginative query in the reader to ask themselves, is this possible? The overall and key reasoning behind creating two versions of the same story is that Martel is distinguishing and evaluating between a story that tells what happened to Pi and one that tells what Pi felt about what happened to him.
Yann Martel dichotomizes the perceptual realities, and psychological realities of Piscine Monitor Patel. Martel is insistent in not "sacrifice[ing] our imagination on the altar of crude reality"(Pi); and to do this, he sets forth in making us wonder whether we are reading an imaginative fiction, or a real life story. Written as a factual account, we are constantly reminded that Pi is alive and doing well in Montreal, but his story's credibility is also constantly held under speculation, with the far-fetched passages such as that of the algae island, and the blind sailor. The differences between facts and realities, fact and fiction, literalism and imagination, are themes that run throughout the narrative. By admitting that they liked the story with the animals more than the one without them, the Japanese officials inadvertently agreed that an emotionally symbolic story is more compelling and of a higher quality than one of a spare factual nature.
soooooooooooo how is it? (:
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