Pi’s Lifeboat, the Serpent or the Rope? A Vedantic Reading of Maya in Yann Martel's Life of Pi

Abstract

Yann Martel’s celebrated novel, Life of Pi, is most often read as a gripping tale of survival and a castaway narrative. Protagonist Piscine Molitor Patel known as Pi finds himself stuck on a lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, and a hyena, all seemingly in shock. His family gone Pi at the brink life contemplates petrifying situation that is now his shocking reality. The hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, and then to Pi’s intense surprise; Richard Parker reveals himself. Soon the tiger kills the hyena, and Pi and Richard Parker are alone together at sea. The most palpable thematic element of the novel is Pi’s struggle on the lifeboat with Richard Parker, the tiger in itself is a major symbolic factor of tremendous magnitude. It is not only an exploration of ontological existence in adversity but also a nuance theological allegory of human existence. Throughout his ordeal, Pi confronts physical and psychological challenges, stabilizing his religious beliefs with the harsh necessities of his survival, his reality of being at the edge of human existence. Pi’s faith forms a major thematic trope in the novel as it is a vital source of his strength and moral solace amidst his atrocious suffering in the wild. Beyond its surface as a castaway narrative, however, the novel “is a religious allegory” (Kuriakose 140).