Life of Pi' Religion and Zoology Essay

Multiple perspectives create a story. The reader’s ordinary and cognitive perspectives contribute meaning to the text. The thematic panorama shows how the writing itself is a nexus of meaning. The authorial perspective moves beyond the scope of the text, and the reader to show how the text belongs to a larger network of stories that have shaped the author’s literary values.

These values explain what the author was trying to accomplish through his text and in what ways he was trying to challenge the reader’s perspective. All four of these complete perspectives are themselves incomplete perspectives on truth. The truth is not flat. It is dynamic, like a sculpture that can be viewed from different angles. To understand the sculpture more completely, you need to walk around it and see it from multiple perspectives.

The ordinary, cognitive, thematic, and authorial perspectives each look at this statue from a different angle. These angles are in dialogue with one another, speaking from opposite sides of the statue. Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a story about growing up featuring a youngster's Pi's endurance for a considerable length of time in the Pacific Ocean on a raft with a grown-up Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Pi grows up around creatures in his family's zoo in India. After the family chooses to move to Canada and sell the zoo creatures, the boat on which they are making the excursion meets with a fiasco and sinks. The ordinary perspective may only be able to see a boy on a lifeboat, but the thematic and authorial perspectives speak from a different angle informing the ordinary that there is a Bengal tiger behind the boy. Let’s say the authorial perspective sees the profile of this large statue that depicts the entire narrative of Pi. This profiled perspective sees both the boy and the tiger in the lifeboat.

It can confirm that both the ordinary and the thematic speak the truth. The authorial perspective may look at the statue a little bit closer and see the inscriptions that the author made on the base of the statue explaining why he sculpted two stories into one lifeboat.

Furthermore, when the authorial speaks to the thematic he will see a more complete connection between the visual text and the inscription. The conversation between the various perspectives continues. Each perspective enriches the conversation of other perspectives. You need to look at the metaphoric statue of Life of Pi from all of these different angles to understand the truths that lie within the text.

The works of Martel while distinguishing between citizenship, nationality, and belonging; emphasize the value of nation and nationality. Martel spent six months in India, visiting temples, mosques, and all the zoos he could find, and a further two years researching animal behavior and the psychology of shipwreck survivors. Creativity and artistic freedom in a writer lead to aesthetic literary values.

“Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven days. Even on a symbolic level, that's creation in a frenzy. To one born in a religion where the better for a single soul can be a relay race run over many centuries, with innumerable generations passing along the baton, the quick resolution of Christianity has a dizzying effect. If Hinduism flows placidly like the Ganges, then Christianity bustles like Toronto at rush hour…..Islam followed right behind, hardly a year later. I was fifteen years old and I was exploring my hometown. The Muslim quarter wasn't far from the zoo. A small, quiet neighborhood with Arabic writing and crescent moons inscribed on the facades of the houses”. (57-58)

Hence artists appear to be imbued with an indefinable power to create out of the mundane experiences of deeper significance echoing a shared verbal imagination in the world of literature. Fact and Fiction are the most significant aspects and subject matter of Martel’s novels, which highlight the eternal qualities of art and its deeper meaning.

Martel is well known for his novel Life of Pi (2001), a fantasy adventure about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a host of zoo animals, including a zebra, an orangutan, a tiger, and a rat. Martel lived in various locales around the world and brings a global sensibility to his writing. In Martel’s novels first-person narrators, self-reflexive narratives, and symbolic or religious issues are common.

Yann Martel takes an ambitious approach to explore universal concepts and themes of love and loss, grief, pleasure, God in human suffering, and exploration of self. Martel is a writer of philosophical thinking, injecting his ideas about mortality and existence into his characters. He also employs tropes of magical realism, presumably to demonstrate that loss can often make someone feel like they live in an alternate reality, despite the subject matter.

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Martel’s power of storytelling demonstrates his belief in the ability of the novel to bear the weight of philosophical, and existential values, the nature of faith, and the importance of religion. Yann Martel’s fiction reflects the difficulties and challenges of theorizing the way in which “national” identity and “nationality” are represented in the Canadian narrative. Martel’s novels display a concern with crossing and transcending traditionally “Fixed” cultural divisions, be they of genre, race, religion, gender, or sexuality.

Martel’s creative writing encompasses many genres: nonfiction and memoir, as well as historical, speculative fiction, self-reflective narratives, meta-fiction, science, and dystopian fiction. Yan Martel’s place in Canadian Literature as well as expostulate on the multilingual and multicultural values that make for an ethical Canada.

Crucial concepts such as Nation as an identity and Transnationalism are what take the discourse beyond colonialism, Diaspora as what broadens such identities, Postmodernism as defies any act of limited definition of identities; Postcolonialism as challenging conventions; Multiculturalism and Globalization as twin transactions that cut across all borders, are discussed in order to prioritize the significance of transnational agendas.

The novel Life of Pi is seen as what challenge and question the boundaries of the nation-state, while moving beyond such limitations to encompass other cultures and backgrounds in the contemporary society of Canada which is influenced by such political and socio-cultural exigencies as the ideologies of Canada a multilingual and multiculturalism “Civil Space”.

Life of Pi deals with themes of displacement and migration; it is a fantasy adventure novel about an Indian boy who explores his spirituality while stranded at sea in a lifeboat with wild animals. Life of Pi explores the impact of stories on religion and allows the reader to ponder over their own beliefs. The novel deals with concepts such as Genre, Hybridity, Identity, and Narrative strategies, in the age of Postmodernism, Post-colonialism, Transnationalism, and Multiculturalism.

The identity crisis is transformed through a struggle for survival in a transitional phase. Notions of identity and location are therefore continually questioned by a postmodern and postcolonial context that foregrounds how cultural identity has become increasingly hybridized. The cultural elements of ethnicity, hybridity, language, and religion are major issues of postcolonial theory.

Pi is a boy who sees God in all things a Hindu by birth, who has become a Muslim and a Christian. Pi’s extensive visits to mosques, churches, and temples, and his reading of the Bible, the Quran, and the Bhagavad Gita prepare him to possess an all-accepting, all-absorbing consciousness. Pi the eponymous hero sets off on his journey from India with his family and a collection of animals from his father's zoo on a voyage to a new life in Canada. Martel describes the personal experiences of migration and dislocation that inspired his Writing. The movement of crossing the Ocean has contributed to the constitution of transnational identities.

“If Hinduism flows placidly like the Ganges, then Christianity bustles like Toronto at rush hour…..Islam followed right behind, hardly a year later. I was fifteen years old and I was exploring my hometown. The Muslim quarter wasn't far from the zoo. A small, quiet neighborhood with Arabic writing and crescent moons inscribed on the facades of the houses.”(58)

Yann Martel’s novels deal with transcending national identity where multilingual and multicultural differences co-exist. Hence this thesis explores questions of Canadian national identity in the age of Globalization. Martel’s narrative intertwines humor with a humane understanding of his world. In conclusion, Martel juggles with a variety of well-known genres, familiar plots, and other literary conventions.

Martel uses Canada to provide a metaphor for an increasingly globalized world, which conceals the difficulties of surviving in day-to-day life. The novels ultimately are signposts to new aesthetics, new civility, and new world order, the contours of which are as yet developing and cannot be fixed at the present moment.

Transnational literature needs postmodern thinking to promote and stimulate researchers to discover a modern theory of diaspora. There is not a single transnationalism experience, and there is not a transnational theory. With his experimental and sophisticated works, Martel appears to have positioned himself as a transnational literary genius.