Preview

Life of Pi

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
764 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Life of Pi
Ang Lee is back with a new movie based on Yann Martel’s novel, Life Of Pi. This film contains many values. The film is about a 16-year old boy named Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, who suffers a shipwreck in which his family dies, and is stranded in the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. An adult Pi narrates his adventurous tale to a young writer sent by his uncle.
Pi was named as Piscine Molitor after a swimming pool in France. While he was studying, everyone around him taunted with the nickname "Pissing Patel". So, he decided to remember the value of Pi expressed in several hundred decimal places to drive home the point and changed his name to Pi.

His family owns a local zoo, and Pi takes an interest in the animals, especially a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. To teach him the reality of the tiger's nature as a carnivore, Pi's father forces him to witness it killing a goat. He is raised Hindu and vegetarian, but at 12 years old, he is introduced to Christianity and then Islam, and starts to follow all three religions. Then his father taught him that If you believe in everything, you will end up not believing in anything at all.
When Pi is 16 , his father decides to close the zoo and move his family to Canada, and sell the zoo animals. The ship encounters a heavy storm and begins to sink while Pi is on deck marveling at the storm. He tries to find his family, but a crew member throws him into a lifeboat.
After the storm, Pi finds himself in the lifeboat with an injured zebra, and is joined by an orangutan. A spotted hyena emerges and kills the zebra. It also mortally wounds the orangutan in a fight. Suddenly the tiger Richard Parker emerges from under the tarp, and kills and eats the hyena.
Pi finds emergency food and water rations on the boat. He builds a small raft so that he can stay at a safe distance from the tiger. Realizing that he must feed the tiger to protect himself, Pi begins fishing. He also collects rain

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Life Of Pi Banned Essay

    • 960 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, all attention is centered on the extraordinary life of Piscine Molitor Patel. He grows up in the Pondicherry Zoo in Southern India. He quickly develops a strong love for animals and is fascinated with every aspect of their lives. As he is growing up, he becomes a devout Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. When he is a teenager, his parents decide to try to achieve a better life by moving to Canada. They plan on taking the animals with them to sell to zoos in the United States. When they are about halfway into the voyage, something goes horribly wrong on the ship, and it begins to sink. Pi is thrown into a lifeboat, along with a few different animals. Initially, it was just a hyena, orangutan, and zebra; however, a tiger soon joins as well. The…

    • 960 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Closed reading responce

    • 460 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The book Life of Pi by Yann Martel is about the story of Pi Patel a 16-year-old boy who survives at sea with a tiger for 227 days. Pi begins his journey when the boat he is one sinks and he gets on a lifeboat. The lifeboat contains a hyena zebra, an orangutan, and Richard Parker the tiger. Throughout the book Pi struggles to stay alive and keep fighting. The theme of loneliness and trying to stay alive plays a big part in this story. Especially in the quote “Without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story.”…

    • 460 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Pi hasn't eaten anything for three days and starts searching for drinking water. Not afraid anymore of the hyena because of the presence of the tiger, he describes the lifeboat.…

    • 1901 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Yann Martel's Life Of Pi

    • 595 Words
    • 3 Pages

    At a first glance, the title of the book, Life of Pi, is puzzling. Chapter five does however, explains the significance of the title. A part of growing up is dealing with flaws, everyone has different flaws. In Piscine’s case his name was his Achilles ankle. People at school pronounced it P. Singh, Sikh, and Pissing. Instead of allowing this to get to him he changed his name to Pi, hence the title Life of Pi.…

    • 595 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    On the journey, the ship sinks and Pi finds himself alone in a life boat, adrift at sea. He soon discovers that he is not the only survivor, but shares his raft with an escaped hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450 pound Bengal tiger, named Richard Parker. Although Pi is confronted with the dangers of these wild animals at sea, his extraordinary knowledge of animal behaviour, along with his faith and determination, allow him to survive, even after the other animals have fallen victim to the tiger’s predatory instincts.…

    • 5330 Words
    • 22 Pages
    Powerful 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

    Richard Parker is a Royal Bengal tiger with whom Pi shares his lifeboat.Weighing 450 pounds and about nine feet long,he kills the hyena on the lifeboat and the blind cannibal.He is a animal though he has a human name.But in the first,he saves pi twice.At the beginning of the story,Pi is afraid of Richard Parker.And then he tames him,they essential companionship.Richard Parker goes alone when they reach land.…

    • 457 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Life of Pi Notes

    • 1831 Words
    • 8 Pages

    * Pi doesn't tell us how or why yet – but he's in a lifeboat, in the wind and the rain, encouraging Richard Parker the tiger, who is in the water, to swim up to him.…

    • 1831 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Life Of Pi Analysis

    • 899 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Why don’t we start in Pi’s childhood, where it all began? Pi grew up in a small town in India. He grew up in the zoo environment, with his dad being the ZooKeeper. So, that very clearly…

    • 899 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Why Is Pi Come Out Alive?

    • 827 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Now open your eyes think how could you have survived on that boat. Pi survived on that boat with a tiger for 227 days on the Pacific Ocean. The only reasons he came out alive was because these three beliefs with is God,his family and his caring of life. Because Pi's parents were strongly religious and had been brought up a serious Hindu. Religion is important to him in his everyday life.…

    • 827 Words
    • 4 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

    The best way to depict the immensity of Pi’s transformation is to have knowledge of who Pi was initially before this chain of events, to really understand where and what Pi came from. A major contributor to Pi’s innocence to killing animals for food is the fact that he was a devout vegetarian, due to his Hindu faith and love of animals. Pi recalls his love of life and creation on page 15, in which he states, “I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate” (Martel, 15). Pi reveals his love of animals through this quote, and also reveals the kind of emotional connection he has with the animals. They are able to uplift Pi’s spirits and feelings because he feels like he is the presence of another living being, which to him, feels like the presence of another person. Another instance in which Pi’s fascination and admiration for animals is clearly seen is…

    • 1147 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    When Piscine first enters the life boat, he has not fully grasped the side of himself which is needed to survive and come of age. “…I was so obviously out matched by Richard Parker that it wasn’t even worth worrying about” is what the narrator says on page 149. At the beginning of Piscine’s adventures, he often has to fight and evade Richard Parker as at that point they have not learned to cooperate with each other. During Life of Pi, Richard parker is a character created by Piscine within his mind for which he blames for the actions he is not willing to accept he committed due to their inhumanity. Piscine creates the story with the tiger in order to cope with his own trauma. In Life of Pi the colour orange symbolises survival, therefore because the tiger is orange it is these action which are needed to survive, the survival instinct. If one comes to realise this part of them they become empowered. They grow and become stronger. Yet because Piscine and Richard Parker are seen as conflicting the reader comes to realise Piscine has not realised that part of himself, and in order to come…

    • 1239 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    life of pie

    • 353 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In the novel, Life of pi, the author Yann Martel shows that the tiger, Richard Parker, influences pi’s survival greatly. All of pi’s morals and beliefs get tested as he gets thrown into a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with a tiger. He begins to learn that to survive himself he must learn to survive with this tiger. Richard parker keeps Pi alive and influences his survival by acting as a defense mechanism and keeping him mentally and physically stable. Throughout Pi’s survival Richard parker was looked at as a defense mechanism towards the previous events because he gives pi hope that they will soon be saved. Pi believes that if a tiger can survive, then he could as well. “It was not a question of him or me, but him and me.” (206). Pi begins to realize that they need to survive together and that that will be the only way either one of them will survive. Richard parker kept pi on his toes, always wondering how to survive each day without a tiger eating him, Richard Parker keeps him thinking and alert of what is going on all the time. He was always writing notes and lists on daily activities or what happened that day. “Plan number one: push him off the life boat” (204). One of Pi’s survival plans was to kill Richard parker. He made plan after plan until he realized that the only way to survive is with him. To keep Richard parker alive he needs food and water, much like Pi. When Pi sees that Richard parker was hungry or thirsty, it reminded him to take care of himself as well. “After all, it was for Richard parker and he would have dispatched it with expert ease” (233). Pi starts killing fish not only for him to eat but for parker as well. He begins to make sure both of them are fed and that they will both survive. Richard Parker helped Pi cope with the journey at hand and survive mentally and physically. Therefore, Richard parker is Pi’s survival.…

    • 353 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Life Of Pi Survival Essay

    • 1294 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Life of Pi, a novel written by Canadian author Yann Martel, is the incredible story of how 16-year old teenager Pi Patel survives 227 days trapped in a lifeboat with only a large 450-pound Bengal tiger for company. During his 7-month ordeal over the vast Pacific ocean, misery, hunger, and desperation threaten to blot out his existence, but with the help of his worst enemy and God, he pushes on. As he is forced to adapt to his new environment to survive, Pi finds himself forced into a harsh world where the best of the best survive.…

    • 1294 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays