Preview

Diction And Symbols In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
151 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Diction And Symbols In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi
Yann Martel wrote Life of Pi to create a specific relationship between the text and the reader. Martel uses diction, similies, metaphors, and symbols to the desired effect of making his readers believers in a greater power. Martel leaves the ending up for interpretation, so the readers can decide which story they believe, the one with the lion, or the one with his mother and the chef. Throughout the novel, we only hear about the story of the tiger, the hyena, the monkey, and the zebra, it is not until the last few chapters where we hear about a story that seems more realistic. Even though the story we hear at the end initially sounds like the more "realistic" story, Martel makes his readers second guess themselves. After reading the story

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    There is a certain method humans deal with stress-inducing situations. Pi created a fictitious mask that saw the horrendous acts of man in a better light in order to carry on with his day-to-day life. A cover-up of good faith to preserve the bits of good humanity that left in Pi’s life. In Pi’s alternate story, the one without the animals, there was a malevolent chef that operated in unconventional ways. The chef was pure evil, murdering a Chinese sailor to settle his hunger. These violent actions are parallel to the work of the hyena in Pi’s main story, the one with animals. The hyena eventually ate and killed the zebra, a fellow animal, for its hunger got the better of him. For the hyena, indigestion of one’s own species does not invokes…

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Throughout literature, certain things are considered to mean something beyond themselves; these symbols make themselves ever present in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. While some symbols appear in an obvious fashion (the glasses, the pig’s head) others like to hide from the reader (the fire, the conch shell). From Piggy’s introduction into the novel, they symbolize of his glasses seemed apparent. The glasses symbolize a voice of reason and logic within the boys, and once Jack took Piggy’s glasses from him and started the fire all the logic dissipated. The shell symbolizes an organized civilization within the boys. As they search for someone a leader, they notice Ralph – one of the oldest in the bunch – holding the conch shell. Since they dubbed Ralph leader “They obeyed the summons of the conch, partly because Ralph blew it, and he was big enough to be a link with the adult world of authority” (Golding 50). The fire symbolizes both the hope of rescue and an innate destructive change and reentrance into a primitive state within the human mind. The pig’s head symbolizes the aggression which Jack harbors toward everything as it becomes more and more dominant throughout the novel, but the pig’s head also becomes a symbol of the savagery and bloodlust of the boys near the end of the novel.…

    • 1190 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    At first Pi was telling Richard Parker to get to the boat which could easily be himself telling himself to get to the boat, when he has trouble reaching it he feels the need to give up and just when he was done with trying he is pulled up onto the life boat. After all how could have the tiger jumped onto the boat. The zebra represents a pattern mainly white and black which a sailor could easily represent. The sailor could have been dressed in white and the blood could have been represented by the black. Going on, once the hyena killed the monkey, the Bengal tiger then killed the Hyena. This could have been Pi enraging when the cook killed his mother. Once Pi killed the cook he was completely gone. I feel that Pi was just visioning a tiger and that is why the tiger never harmed him and rarely interacted with him. When Pi found the island I felt that he was simply not ready for real life and so he was drastically scared and so he thought he saw dead fish on the island, which caused him to only explore during the day. The island was considered toxic but no where on this planet has ever been recorded to have found an island so toxic and this 'island' was also never…

    • 764 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the short story “The story of Keesh” and the excerpt The life of Pi demonstrates how these characters have been able to survive with all the techniques and the tools that have been given to them throughout these Excerpt and short story. This matters because it shows how these characters were able to survive in an extreme environment with some sort of hope on their…

    • 588 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Life of Pi” written by Yann Martel is an incredibly philosophical novel that tells the story of survival. Pi Patel, a young Indian boy, is faced against the impossible when his family’s boat is shipwrecked and he is left stranded in a lifeboat with an interesting and potentially harmful group of animals: a zebra, an orangutan, a vicious hyena, and the magnificent Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger with a human like name. Throughout the novel, due to his situation of being stranded, Pi had to take drastic measures in order to survive. Part of his need to survive resulted in Pi giving up his vegetarian ways. Slowly throughout the book, readers witness the transformation from Pi’s civil eating habits to an animalistic devouring of…

    • 1511 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Life of Pi Symbolism

    • 885 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Karanvir Dhami Ms. Yu ENG3U March 7, 2011 Symbolism in Life of Pi In Life of Pi there are many literary devices used to present the different themes in the novel. The main literary device used in Life of Pi is symbolism. Symbolism is often used to represent an object to something else, either by association or by resemblance. Most of the names of animals, objects and even humans in this novel have a symbolic meaning. In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, symbolism such as pi’s name, the colour orange and the algae island, are used throughout the novel to provide Pi with protection to help him either survive or overcome his emotional pain. The mathematical pi is undefined, infinite and unable to be understood, just like Piscine Patel. Piscine’s nickname is Pi and it has a symbolic relationship with the mathematical pi. Pi is sixteen when he is shipwrecked, and pi is also the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. Not only is the mathematical pi symbolic towards Pi, but it also provided him protection from school. Many of Pi’s classmates made fun of his full name and called him names such as “Pissing Patel”. When Pi transferred to a new school he took the first available opportunity to use his nick name, with “that Greek letter that looked like a shack … *Pi+ found refuge” (Martel, ). This nickname allowed him to find the protection from the bullying he would have got if he had used his actual name. The Greek letter symbolizes the roof the nickname has placed over Pi emotionally. Before the nickname was being used all his former classmates new him as only as…

    • 885 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    They had gone on a ship to voyage to Canada. In the sequence of events, the ship ends up sinking. Pi manages to escape the sinking vessel by grabbing hold of a lifeboat (104-105). A zebra, orangutan, hyena, and a lion manage to escape on the tiny vessel. They all find themselves stranded in open waters without a semblance of land. Without a way out, the hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan(128-133). Out of the blue, the lion attacks and murders the hyena. Pi and the lion are now the last survivors (155-156). Pi and the lion named Richard Parker; acknowledge that they will have to trust one another in order to survive. Reviewing the story, we gather a great picture as the story develops. Life of Pi has depicted the will to live. What Life of Pi has shown us is being able to survive through insurmountable odds. In the midst of surviving, all the organisms that were on the lifeboat fought to survive. Pi was a vegetarian and he abandoned vegetarianism to eat fish in order to keep living. Also the orangutan fought for it's life, against the hyena before it was brutally consumed. Martel shows us that animals will often do such extraordinary action in order to…

    • 489 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering, I should turn to God.”(pg. 283-284) In the “life of Pi” by Yann Martel, Pi possesses several characteristics allowing him to survive his long, epic journey across the Pacific Ocean. His great determination pushed him to the brink and his hopes in God helped him soar and constantly fought despair. Pi practiced his pious ways and his hopes soared as he prayed to God. Also, the castaway's immense knowledge of animals saved his life; it permitted him to cope with Richard Parker, the 450-pound Bengal Tiger trapped on the lifeboat with him. It also helped him find ways to capture and nourish…

    • 673 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The life of pi by Yann Martel is the amazing survival story of pi. He has to brave the ocean in a single raft, but, he has more to worry about then food, water, and shelter. He must survive the entire ordeal while accompanied by a Bengal tiger. Through sheer determination, Pi’s understanding of animal and human habits and his strong belief in religion him and the tiger preserver and survives.…

    • 492 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One of the significant literary features of the passage is its odd diction, offset from the rest of the book due to Pi’s delusional state of mind and his maintained sensitivity to the occurrence. This causes the conclusion and religious sentiment of Pi’s journey to be accentuated as a direct result of intentional word choice. Pi arrives on the beach slightly crazed from his time at sea, as can be observed from the way his perceptions are distorted, with a fear that, “in two feet of water, I would drown,” (Martel 284). He continues on with his confusion as he comments on his surroundings, animating the beach he resided on and breaking down following Richard Parker’s leave only clarifying how questionable his mental state was. He acts disconnected…

    • 265 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, he wants the reader to decipher whether his first story or his second story is real. The first story consists of the protagonist, Piscine Patel, being trapped on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, Richard Parker, and many other animals from his father’s zoo after they were lost together at sea. In the second story, Piscine re-tells a different story with a chef, his mother, and a sailor, this was to give the Japanese investigators “a story that wont surprise them (you)” (Martel 302). Martel clearly wishes the reader to understand why “Pi” might have been more truthful in the one story rather than the other. He does this through different hints scattered throughout the novel. Martel never truly admits which story is true, but various occurrences throughout the novel make the actual story obvious depending on the readers perception.…

    • 1476 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Life of Pi

    • 594 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Life of Pi makes the reader question whether this is imaginative or real life fiction. The story of Pi's survival is, on the one hand, a classic high-sea survival account, a gruelling tale of one boy's survival at sea on a raft against all that nature throws at him. The author is constantly reminding the reader that the real character of Pi is alive and well and living happily after his ordeal in Montreal.…

    • 594 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Metaphors In Life Of Pi

    • 198 Words
    • 1 Page

    In this passage, Pi uses a metaphor to describe what it feels like to be stranded in the ocean. Considering that only a few people have gone through a similar situation, this metaphor puts into perspective what Pi regularly goes through. According to Pi, being a castaway is like being “a point perpetually at the centre of a circle”. Since the horizon always seems the same wherever Pi drifts, Pi (the point) feels as if he is constantly in the center of the ocean (circle). Along with this perspective, this metaphor also shows Pi’s hopelessness and loneliness he is facing as a castaway. Pi hopes for rescue, but at the same time, he loses the hope he still has left. This is because he knows rescue is unlikely. Similarly, Pi experiences loneliness,…

    • 198 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    life of pi

    • 1059 Words
    • 5 Pages

    in 2001, Yann Martel authored the fantasy adventure novel, Life of Pi. It is a story about how the narrator and his family are transporting some of the animals from their zoo, when suddenly the ship sinks, and we see how the narrator succeeds in saving the three old adult Bengal tiger, Richard Parker.…

    • 1059 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a pyramid that includes five basic psychological needs that ensure the survival and growth needs of humans (Simply Psychology). In order to reach the top of the pyramid one must first obtain the most important basic need at the bottom of the pyramid - physiological. This is the basic need of food, water, sleep, rest, in order to become stronger and survive. In the Life of Pi, Pi reaches this stage when he is stranded in the middle of the ocean on a boat and he comes to the realization that he needs suitable food, water, and rest to sustain himself. Furthermore, Pi states “I had not had a drop to drink or bite to eat or a minute of sleep in three days” (148, Yann Martel). Through his eagerness to attain food,…

    • 687 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays