Story Telling In The Life Of Pi

854 Words4 Pages
Story Telling in The Life of Pi Life of Pi is a novel about a boy, Pi Patel, recounting his elaborate survival at sea on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, Richard Parker. In the conclusion of the novel, however, he presents a much more simplistic story that replaces the animal characters with humans. Although not clearly stated, it is gathered that the “story without animals” is in fact the true tale of his survival. The two different stories present the major theme of the novel, the importance of storytelling. Pi tries to show value in storytelling, even convincing that the fictional story is the better story. Despite this achievement, Life of Pi manages to demonstrate the many flaws storytelling can have, including confusing the audience, insulting to the original story, and discrediting the author. Although it could be argued to be beautiful and heartwarming, the story in Life of Pi can be very confusing to the audience trying to interpret it. One example is if someone were trying to determine the actual events of Pi’s survival at sea. Pi presented the audiences with two different stories and, although one does seem more reasonable, he never really clarifies which story is true. The audience can blindly accept the ‘story without animals’ or can even accept the ‘better story’, as it is still a possibility, as it has not been denied. It is even possible that Pi did not actually share the truth, and the actual tale was never told. Amid all these choice the audience can get lost in confusion. One can even get confused as one tries to analyze and compare the two stories. It appears that most of the animals in the original story can be used to represent a human in the latter story, such as the tiger representing Pi himself, or the orangutan representing his mother. However not all aspects can be so clearly transformed. The audience will not so clearly see what the
Open Document