Life of Pi Analysis

1895 Words8 Pages
Life of Pi Analysis The book Life of Pi was basically about the life and times of Piscine Molitor Patel. Pi grew up in India with his mother, father, and his older brother Ravi. In the following paragraphs you will learn more about what I read. Growing up in India was the best place to be to Pi. Pi's family owned the nearby zoo that was called the Pondicherry Zoo it was the only zoo in all of India. They named it the Pondicherry Zoo after the town they lived in. All the people and animals in the zoo knew Pi very well. Pi Patel was the only visitor who came to the zoo that was able to feed the animals. Life of Pi is intended, so Martel tells us, to make the reader believe in God. This bold, apparently evangelical, premise locates it on a dangerous moral high ground. D.H. the Lawrence warned against using the novel as a forum for author to assert his own moral or religious belief: Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality. (D.H. Lawrence, "Morality and the Novel") Aesthetically, the fiction which reveals a truth by explicit sermonising rather than as a natural conclusion drawn from the relationships and events it presents, is displeasing, even "immoral." Indeed, Martel's statement is likely to have the opposite effect on his reader, provoking a determined counter-reaction not to succumb to a didactic religious agenda. Surely enough, Life of Pi fails to meet its ambition. As he travels through its pages, apparently on the Damascun road to enlightenment, the reader will not, atheist or already committed follower, experience some major revelation to the spirit, coming to, or restoring, a belief in God. Nor, despite Martel's explicit but deceptive statement, is he intended to. Instead, Life of Pi achieves something more

More about Life of Pi Analysis

Open Document