DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L315.90
Authors: Dylan Black
Abstract:
In Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi, the protagonist Piscine Molitor Patel (“Pi”) experiences childhood on the grounds of his father’s zoo in Pondicherry, India, a period which is also a time of religious awakening for him, as he grapples with the three faiths he is exposed to, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. About a third of the way through the novel, Piscine survives as the ship, carrying both his family and the animals from their zoo from India to Canada, goes down somewhere in the mid-Pacific. Pi then finds himself on a lifeboat with several of the animals, most problematic of which is the presence of a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Interpretation of the novel typically focuses on the 227-day ocean journey which follows, as Pi uneasily co-exists, and ultimately survives, alongside Richard Parker, both washing up on the Pacific shores of Mexico near the end of the novel.
Two of the principal scholarly studies of the novel are by Werner Wolf and Rebecca Duncan, and the contrasts between them are neatly summarized in a recent (2011) article in Style: whereas Wolf interprets the novel primarily in terms of Pi’s religious experience, calling his Pacific experience a “spiritual rite of passage” (110) and a “theodicy” (112) in which religion and love of God ultimately deliver him and enable him to survive, Duncan contends that the novel is “foremost an experimental survivor narrative that participates in the emerging discourse on trauma and postmodern culture” (168). Duncan, whose article is titled “Life of Pi as Postmodern Survivor Narrative,” downplays the role of religion in the novel, or rather subsumes it into her argument for the novel as being a “postmodern” narrative: “True to his postmodern subjectivity…Pi narrates the evolution of his multiple religious faiths in a self-consciously layered form” (175). Duncan situates Life of Pi within a discourse of trauma, in which the self (in this case, the protagonist Pi) becomes “decentred, multiple, fragmented, unfettered by a single notion of truth” (167). Wolf and Duncan, publishing articles in 2004 and 2008 respectively, represent the polarities in the Academy thus far on the novel, with Wolf foregrounding religious experience and storytelling, concluding that “both poetic and religious faith…is still possible and can be persuasively linked to ethics” (120), and Duncan less convincingly emphasizing “the process of articulation and development of what she regards as Pi’s postmodern self” (Stefanescu 56).
This paper will intervene in the scholarly debate by arguing that religion, insofar as it informs part of Pi’s worldview--the second crucial contribution being his understanding of ecology stemming from his father’s rational and secular-minded approach to the zoo--is a vital part of his survival in what can be called the latest “island fiction” in the literary canon. Although criticized by Duncan and others, Werner Wolf is right to connect Martel’s novel with the “essential ‘master-narratives’ of humanity” (108). The “master-narratives” we can rightly connect to Life of Pi include not only religious narratives (the “better story”) but also landmark “island fictions” of which Martel’s is only the latest exemplar.
Keywords: Yann Martel, island fiction, master narrative, trauma, survivor narrative
Updating...