Life of Pi

Life of Pi: The Symmetrical Sea

Author's Note: This is my summative Life of Pi essay. Ever since we finished reading Life of Pi, my support group and I have been working on these essays. At first, just the thought of composing a paper this immense overwhelmed me to the point where I struggled just to get my thoughts together. After almost a month of feeling like I was going nowhere, I realized that all that time was just how long I needed to simply gather my ideas. Once I had my organization laid out and my thesis developed, my essay was easier than I thought it would be. I used a sophisticated, systematic approach to organization. When I completed my paper, I decided to use it as my DWA in addition to using it as my Life of Pi summative essay. I feel really strongly about my topic and how it relates to the novel. 

Love and self-absorption, satisfaction and desperation -- they are complete opposites, yet vital for everyday life. As human beings, we strive for the best in life. We constantly want to be happy and enjoy life to the fullest. When struggles are apparent and we are temporarily in discomfort, it's hard for us to see the pleasures that are around us. Though sometimes our ability to see the whole situation is marred by our current problems, each one is necessary for us to grow and learn from. Without pain in the world, the most desirable pleasures in life would be impossible to grasp.

The main opposites within this world are pleasure and pain. Both are very simplistic thoughts. There is a physical and emotional side to each of them. In Life of Pi, Pi found pleasure in the beauty of the natural word. He delighted in the randomness of how the flying fish sailed through the air in the moment when he needed food the most. He thanked God for such a physical pleasure: food. When he killed the dorado to prepare his meal, he experienced another kind of joy. "The dorado did a most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its surface as it struggled."(p. 185) This magnificent sight gave Pi a sense of happiness, and showed him that even in the middle of difficulty pleasure could be found.

Pi emotionally satisfied himself through daily prayers and mediation. Through his search to find God he attained contentment. As he kneeled on his prayer rug reflecting on himself, he fulfilled his need to know the truth and found enjoyment through that. When he was stranded at sea, some of his greatest comforts were when he praised God for the simplest things. Even though he had so many reasons to be upset, he gave thanks for the things he could. Through relaxation and mediation Pi achieved mental pleasure.

When we get a compliment or have a good meal, we find simple gladness. When we spend time with loved ones -- family or friends -- we get a feeling of relaxation, almost contentment. It emotionally fills our need to be loved and to love, and it physically satisfies our love of comfort.

In Pi's life pain was most evident when he was alone at sea. At first, he felt an emotional discomfort of abandonment because he had lost his family. As time passed, he physically endured pain. Hunger, thirst, and lack of sleep were constant struggles Pi faced in the lifeboat. Even his skin burned with rashes from the salt water. Difficulties surrounded Pi as the days passed by to the point where he lost his ability to see and to walk.

We tend to see pain in the world more often than we see pleasures. We think we are in so much trouble when one little thing goes wrong that we can't even distinguish the pleasures that are present. Sometimes the greatest delights are what we can't see through our tiny discomforts. When someone offends us or is unjust to us it is hard for us to look past it and realize we still have the best joys in life: food to eat, a place to call home, and people to love.

Though pain is despised and pleasure is desired, logically, the two are inevitable. Every action in life is either a pain or a pleasure. In Life of Pi, Yann Martel illustrates to us how both are essential. When Pi became stranded at sea his struggles were more apparent than his pleasures. He had a hard time seeing past his need for food and his thirst for water, much less his desires for someone to rescue him. After many days of mourning on the lifeboat, Pi began to look past these difficulties and delight in the natural world and the beauties that he had never cared for before. When his journey in the ocean ended, Pi finally realized just how wonderful certain things in the world were. Even though we often reflect on the painful aspects of life rather than the pleasurable ones, there is an equal balance in the world.

Often our ability to see both of these forces as equivalent is marred because we believe that in our current situation pain is only present. Sometimes just the opposite is true; the predicament we are in is what we need to fully appreciate the pleasures we have. Often, it just takes that difficult situation to help us truly see all the wonders in this world that we take for granted. In the beginning of the book, when the author met Pi in person he took note of how much Pi cherished the feel of the warm dough in hands and how he ate only the tastiest meals. "He's an excellent cook … He makes me the most zesty yet subtle macaroni and cheese I've ever had. And his vegetarian tacos would be the envy of all Mexico." (p.24) Only after Pi had gone through his traumatic experience on the lifeboat was he able to see food in this way.

An ancient Chinese concept that helps explain the need for a balance of pain and pleasure is Yin Yang. Yin and Yang are two complementary forces in the world that work together to create balance. In the image, both Yin and Yang are necessary to complete the picture. Without one another the image could be incomplete. Some say that one is good and the other is evil, but ultimately those are man-made names given to these two forces. Neither one is considered better than the other. They are both simply opposites like pain and pleasure where both rely on the other to create balance.

A main controversy that has been brought up throughout ancient history is: why do we have pain in our lives? God gave us the Bible to help us better understand the answers to these questions. Through the story of Jesus, the Bible illustrates for us why we need pain. Jesus had to endure a lot of discomfort in his life time. He was constantly ridiculed and everyone always tried to prove him wrong. In the end, he was whipped, forced to wear a crown of thorns, and crucified on a cross. Jesus never seemed to oppose his trouble because he knew that it was the only way to show us that God truly loved us. Jesus knew that there was no other way to demonstrate God's deep, everlasting love than to die for us.

God made the ultimate sacrifice, to show us why we need an equal balance of pain and pleasure in life. He gave us these difficulties in our lives so we too could express our love for other people. Love is such a hard concept to grasp that words sometimes fail us, so God provided a way for us to tell one another that we sincerely love them. If the world didn’t have this evil force, it would've been impossible for God to show us that he loved us more than anything else. We need pain to experience the best pleasure in the world: love.

When Pi came across the island in Life of Pi, Yann Martel showed us what happens when we try to avoid balance of these two forces. All of Pi's needs were met on the island -- clean water, fresh food, and solid ground. Though it seemed like the most desirable place during the day, when the sun set it turned evil and poisoned everything on it. Before he knew about that, Pi weighed the option of forgetting about making it to the shore and just staying on the island. He wanted to desert his current situation of pain for a life of pure pleasure. Little did he know, someone else had made that decision, too. Pi came across his remaining teeth on the island, and made the assumption that the person must have just slowly faded out of the world without anyone knowing about it. Pi realized that to live a life of on that island would be like not living at all.

He realized that we need to do hard things to make our lives count. At the end of the day, it is not our comforts, but our hardships that makes us who we are. Without going through struggles we would have no successes, no accomplishments, and no legacy to leave behind. We need to continue to push ourselves to experience true joy. Through the island and Pi's struggles, Yann Martel tells us that the best pleasures in the world are the ones that can only be experienced after going through pain.

In the end, it isn't our troubles that are remembered, but the way we overcame them. People who give up and lose hope slowly fade out of this world, but people who endure hardships are revolutionized. We were not meant to always be happy; we were meant to make an impact on the world. Sometimes, in order to do that we must first go through a rough time to fully understand the world around us. Only when we can see all the pleasures surrounding us can we make a real difference in the world. Our impact can be as simple as expressing our love for one another. Though it seems easy, love is one of the most challenging aspects of life to demonstrate. It is vital for us to have pain in the world in order to help us complete this task of loving one another.

Something so Magnificent

Author's Note: This is a poetic response to Life of Pi. I'm still new to writing poetic responses, but I think I've improved since the last time I did it. I decided to describe the lightening on page 233 and explain how important it was to Pi. To me it was a sign to Pi that God hasn’t forgotten about him and reminding him of the beauty God. I decided to write about this in my poem by using text evidence and a few semantic devices including the repeating initial pattern.

Something so magnificent,

A terrifying sight,

A lonely lifeboat,

A lost castaway,

Who am I?

Nothing but a speck in the vast ocean,

A single strike,

One of many,

Takes my breath away.

His hand reaching down so close to me,

Still so far from Him,

My belief is fading,

Has He forgotten?

He is trying to speak to me,

But I’m not hearing,

He is trying to demonstrate his love,

But I’m not seeing,

Trying to shout through roaring oceans,

But I’m not hearing,

Trying to look day and night for Him,

In the silent sea,

In the vast horizon,

Yet never finding,

When worst comes to worst,

I spot Him,

In the raging sea,

In the furious lightening,

Right in front of my face,

Just barley missing me.

Normality

Author's Note: This is yet another timed response written in our literature group. Though I'm still struggling with these timed responses, I think I've improved from the last one. I was really trying to stay focused on the prompt, work on my vocabulary, and incorporate syntactic and semantic devices. The prompt was: Take any significant quote and discuss it's significance to the theme. As you can tell, the opening quote was the one I picked.

"I became attached to these oceanic hitchhikers, though they weighed down the raft a little. They provided distraction, like Richard Parker… what I saw was an upside-down town, small, quiet and peaceable, whose citizens went about with the sweet civility of angels. The sight was a welcome relief for my frayed nerves."(pg 198) As Pi mentioned previously in the book, a key to survival is being lightly distracted. Pi takes comfort in a small town of algae growing on his raft. He can't seem to take his eyes off this beautifully crafted village. Though it is more than just this little town that intrigues Pi, it is the concept of the conventions that this civilization seems to lack. Fish swim by, stay for a while, and then leave on their way. It asks just as a hotel without the burden of paying, tipping, and every other detail that costs a fortune. This upside-down town is metaphorically and literally turned 'upside-down'. With the literal side being obvious, this city is upside-down metaphorically because it is different from the rest. It is put aside and minds it's own business with the citizens peacefully coming and going. In the ocean of life, all towns have their own lifestyles that they think are so called 'right' and 'normal'. Truly, there is no norm. For if everyone is different, than no one can be normal. Conventions try to tell us what normality is, though conventions are only illusions, hallucinations of the mind.

In Life of Pi, Pi continuously demonstrates that the ocean is full of tiny organisms. From looking at the ocean from the cargo ship, Pi only sees dolphins and thinks the Pacific is rather lifeless. When looking from the lifeboat, Pi sees every minuscule life formation. He constantly ponders about everything he sees; giving himself a light distraction from his horrible reality. Pi realizes that this nightmare he appears to be living in is everything but normal. This leads him to wonder if anything is really normal and what that means. He illustrates this through the upside-down town. It is a conventional town, but completely different in an uncommon way. Therefore, by contradicting itself it is implying that conventions are only things we believe to be true.

If we were to search the world, we would never be able to find someone identical to ourselves. If we were to look up into the snow falling to the ground, no two snowflakes would be alike. If we were to search the universe, there would be no two stars exactly alike. Normality is nothing but a convention and a convention is nothing but a mere thought in the mind. We need to embrace that everything is different and created in a unique way. We need to stop setting false averages and standards for ourselves. For no one is average, no one is normal, and no one is the same. Each one of us is our own upside-down town.

Goals

Author's Note: This is a response to the prompt: Discuss the significance of coming up with plans to deal with Richard Parker, and what this may be a metaphor of in real life, and how we deal with problems. This was rather difficult for me because I haven't written to a prompt in a while and this was done in one period. Please give me feedback.

Picture a beach, a small secluded piece of land. Try look across the ocean as far as you can, try to see the other side. It goes on and on, for miles and miles you can't tell where it ends and begins. It seems so disconnected to our world, yet it isn't. It is just like our little world -- scary and unpredictable. Just as a lifeboat with zoo animals and a young boy doesn't appear to be like our world at all, it is. The ocean is so much more complex than the surface level. We can relate to that lifeboat better than we can relate to the people see walk down the street day after day.

A major situation Pi is faced with while stranded on this lifeboat is the issue of the 450 pound tiger starving for a good meal. With all the time on his hands, yet limited time before the tiger attacks, Pi comes up with a list plans. All rather unreasonable, some more than others, each plan Pi numbers and explains why the plan wouldn't work. Some may ponder why Pi came up with these blasphemy plans, but the truth is he really never intended to carry them out. He only made them to give himself a sense of order. In this unpredictable sea we need to plan and set goals to give ourselves a sense of direction, too. If we don't have goals we are trying to reach, we are nothing but a lost lifeboat waiting for the day when we can see the shore.

As the anonymous sticker posted around town suggests, Have Goals. Yann Martel also agrees that we need to plan out our lives. Whether they are short term or long term, goals lead us down the right path. Even though everyone travels the road of life, there are plenty of paths to choose. As Matthew 7:13 tells us "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it." Many people who don't set goals involuntarily lead themselves down the road of destruction, but the people who make goals journey down the road less traveled.

Just the Beginning

Author's Note: This is a response to the first few chapters in book two of Life of Pi. I mainly focused on how the ocean is a symbol of life. It kind of sounds like the first piece I wrote by using the ocean as a symbol of life, but it's really not the same .I focused more on how being dropped into the middle of the ocean was when Pi's life began.  I really tried to expand my vocabulary in this piece.

"The ship sank. It made a sound like a monstrous metallic burp. Things bubbled at the surface and then vanished. Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart." (pg. 97) The moment when we step out of our cozy comfort box is something we all fear. The moment we enter the ocean of life without a large ship keeping us away from the unknown beneath us is to be dreaded even more. The ship gave birth to Pi in the middle of the ocean, just as we entered this world uncertain of where we were and why we were here. Life a is journey through the ocean, we think our path is clear cut, but obstacles can pop out at us from nowhere.

For years and years scientists have tried to explain the vast, exquisiteness of the ocean, yet we still can't wrap our minds around it. How deep it is and where the Atlantic Ocean reaches the Pacific Ocean are things we still ponder. Just like the ocean, scientists have tried to explain life. They give everyone an average age to live to and doctors try to predict deaths. Clearly, these are just guesses, because like the ocean, we don't know when life ends and what is in between the beginning and the end.

In Pondicherry, Pi's life had boundaries. He knew where everything was and everything had a place in the world. The animals lived in their cages, and the humans in their houses. There was balance and order. Life as he knew it was not the same in the lifeboat. The animals weren't in their cages, the water below lurked with unknown creatures, and the one thing that comforted Pi -- his family -- was somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.

Pi's life journey began the moment he entered the lifeboat, just as our lives began when we entered this world. Sometimes we don't know where we are going and we just want to give up, but like Pi we have to just keep believing that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. Never loose hope that the rescue boats are coming.

Accepting

Author's Note: In our support group we are trying write poetry responses to Life of Pi. My poem is about a quote I got from page 75,"Technology helps and good ideas spread -- these are two laws of nature. If you don't let technology help you, if you don't resist good ideas, you condemn yourselves to dinosaur hood!" Since I was trying to make my poem more concrete I used a story from the Bible to get my message across. The story is about when Jesus came to save the world and how the Jews wouldn't except that he was the one they had been waiting for. The Jews were so used to they're conventional ways that they refused to accept him as they're king. I've never done something like this before, so please give me feedback.

There he was standing right in front of them.

There he was riding on a donkey.

There he was with palm leaves all around him.

The promised one, their savior,

But who was he but a mere peasant?

Where was his crown and glory?

Who was he compared to them?

They'd been waiting for too long,

They became blind to the one thing they were looking,

The sacrifices, the temples, the offerings,

It all had lost it meaning centuries ago.

When the cruel traditions had the chance to change,

They refused because that was all they knew.

When the ultimate sacrifice was made,

They continued like nothing happened.

They just couldn't accept that the Old Testament had ended.

Social Ranks

Author's Note: This response is to chapters 10-17 in Life of Pi. In chapters 13 and 14, Pi talks about the animal's rank sin society and how important it is to them. Also, he talks about how they try to associate with the higher rank. I decided to write about this section because I knew I could really relate it to humans and how much we care about our social rankings.

"The animal in front of you must know where it stands, whether above or below you. Social rank is central to how it leads its life. Rank determines whom it can associate with and how; where and when it can eat; where it can rest; where it can drink; and so on." (Martel, 44) This exert from Life of Pi demonstrates how in the zoo the rank of an animal on the food chain can determine it's whole lifestyle. This is no different for us humans, we live according to what we are ranked in society. Though the higher ranking humans don't eat the lowest, they take advantage of them; though our rankings are not as clear as animals, we still segregate ourselves from them; though we don't lead people by fear, we still have the illusion that people are higher and lower than others. Just as animals live their lives based on the food chain, we change our lifestyles to fit in with our rank in society.

In the next chapter of the book, Pi describes that since we are the most dangerous animal in the zoo, we are also highest on the food chain. You wonder why lions and tigers never attack they're trainers. It is because they have the most to gain by keeping a close relationship with the humans. Living in the middle rank of society, we try to associate with the highest class in hopes to become one of them. We constantly look up to the upperclassmen. Even in school we always try to be friends with the most popular people. It is all out of selfish motives, though. The animals don't actually care about their trainer, they just want to look higher up in the eyes of the other animals.

We care too much about our ranks, looks, and what other people think of us. These things are just ways other humans have tried to group us. We can learn from animals not to stress about rankings as they do. Just as they follow the food chain, we can either conform to these ways like them or break free and live not caring what people think of us.

The Ocean

Author's Note: This is a response to the first three chapters in Life of Pi. I explored the idea that life is an ocean, not a swimming pool. I took some of my ideas from a conversation my support group had with Mr. Johnson before we started the book.

You start with your toe, then your whole foot, and slowly make your way up your body. Before you know it you're completely submerged in the water. You come up to take a deep breath and look at your surroundings. There's the solid, concrete bottom of the pool where your feet currently rest. There's the slow incline on the bottom, reaching down to the deepest part the pool of which you can see perfectly. There's the diving boarded where the kids are lining up, each one to frightened to actually jump. What are they scared of? It's clear once they jump the only place they're going is right into the pool of which they've been before. Everything in the swimming pool is so predictable, you know that every half hour the lifeguard will change shifts, and the filter will continue to suck the dirt from the pool. Life is not this clear cut swimming pool; life is an ocean, where you have no idea what is beneath your feet.

In Life of Pi by Yann Martel, the main character, Piscine Molitor, explores the idea that life is an ocean. His uncle, Mamaji, is very conventional, he continuous talks about swimming pools and his many experiences in them. All Mamaji knows is swimming pools, and he tries to teach Pi how to swim. Pi wasn't very fond of swimming at first, but as he continued to learn he started to enjoy doing a stroke over and over, as it was increasingly getting easier. Pi was born into this lifestyle and he had no choice. He was even named after a pool, and as we all know, we cannot choose our names. Just because he was named after a famous swimming pool does not been he has to be swimmer and stick to the conventional ways of this family, he has the choice to live life in the ocean instead of a swimming pool.

Ever year my family takes a vacation to Mexico, when we are there my dad always asks me what I like better, the pool or the ocean. Almost every time I've said I enjoy the swimming pool more, not because I didn't like the feel of the waves lifting me up into the sky, or the soft sand on my feet. It was because I liked being able to see the bottom of the swimming and knowing where I'll go if I decide to swim to the other side. I liked the predictability. When I was in the ocean, I didn't know where the waves would take me or what I would step on if I let my feet touch the bottom. There was sharks, exotic fish, and many other thing in the ocean that I couldn't see.

The ocean is what everyday life is, it's reality. The swimming pool is a fake thing we create to make us feel safe and make us feel like we are in control. We don't necessarily have to always swim in the ocean, sometimes things in our life are going to make us feel like we are in a swimming pool instead. Even in the ocean, we can decide where we want to go, we have the ability to advocate our own choices.

The Most Dangerous Animal

Author's Note: This is a response to chapters 4-9 of Life of Pi. I talked about how in Pi's father's zoo he says the most dangerous animals are humans and yet again I talk about conventions.

There's tigers, lions, hippos, elephants, and many other ferocious animals in the zoo. We often walk around the zoo pondering ideas about the animals, trying to figure out what song the birds are really singing or what's on the hippopotamus's mind as it soaks in the water. Sometimes our minds even wander to thinking about what would happen if all the animals were set free. We try to figure out who would kill who and which animal would be the last standing, who would be the most dangerous. The truth is -- we've known it all along -- that there is only one type of animal that has power over all the others. It's us. You and me and everyone else, we are the most dangerous animals in the zoo.

The world is our prey, we kill our own kind along with all the other animals. The novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel describes how Pi's fathers teaches everyone at his zoo that they are the most dangerous animal. At the front of the zoo he put up a little stand that says DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL I N THE ZOO? Right next to it he put a little curtain covering the answer.  Every person who passed by would eagerly look behind the curtains to see what it was, only to be greeted by there reflection bouncing back at them. It was a mirror showing that they were the most dangerous animal in the zoo. Not the tigers or elephants, but the mere humans coming for entertainment were the most dangerous. The caged animals in the zoo represent the people who stick to their conventional ways of life and even when they are set free they choose not to leave their lifestyle. We are the most harmful animals in the zoo because we control it, and we can contaminate the swimming pool of conventions these animals swim in. Just has many people have preached religious things, yet done horrible things themselves, we try to protect these animals, yet we throw poisonous foods into their cages.

Simply put, we are harmful, dangerous, and nasty creatures, but we don't always have to be this way. We can either disrupt the conventional lives of the people around us or we can be good civilized people. I'm not saying that we need to conform to these conventional ways, but we must live with a purpose and know why we do the things we do.