In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the theme of storytelling is implemented from the very beginning of the novel starting with the author’s note. Life of Pi, is a narrative of Pi’s life from pieces put together by the “author” from snip-its directly from Pi and from Mr. Adirubasamy to put the story of Pi’s survival into a first person account and diary entries.

“Suppose the text is contrived and the writer is lying to the reader, writing a life as one would like it rather that as it is.”(Duyfhuizen 75) It is not till we read between the lines of the author’s note are readers able to see that the author in the author’s note is not actually Yann Martel, but a make-believe author. Yann Martel makes Life of Pi a framed narrative, where Martel is the author of the novel itself, but within the novel, there is a fictitious author who is telling the story of Pi within the author’s book. At the end of the novel, the Japanese transcript from Pi’s interrogation is presented, where Pi’s two true stories to the story of survival are revealed.

“From the Homeric singers to Cervantes in his preface to Don Quixote, authors have framed their tales with claims of either authority or nonauthority.”( Duyfhuizen 133)In the author’s note, the story of Pi’s survival is introduced as “… a story that will make you believe in God.”(Martel x) The readers are introduced to Pi’s story by an already fictitious author telling a fictitious story. The author’s note introduces the theme of storytelling and the idea of using storytelling to explain the tragic , painful, or uninteresting. In the author’s note, Martel places the fact that his story is nonfiction and that he actually talked to Pi. By using his authority as the author of the book, though it’s fiction, Martel invokes the idea that not only the frame is untrue, but the story as well is untrue.

Throughout Pi’s first person account of the survival, the readers believe that Pi is actually on a boat with Richard Parker, a tiger, Orange Juice, the orangutan, the hyena, and the zebra. For most of the story that Pi tells, it seems plausible, though very anthropomorphist. It is not until the narrative leads to the island that “the narrative leaps into a fantasy realm that challenges the reader by its apparent departure from the predominantly realistic mode of the rest of the novel.”(Cooper) We are introduced to a carnivorous island, that in the end Pi says is factual in his counterargument about the bonsai with “’whoever heard of such trees? They’re botanically impossible’… ‘I believe what I see.’’(Martel 295). The island is a carnivorous island covered in algae , where Pi and Richard Parker leave once Pi finds teeth in the trees as leaves. This island can be seen literally as a hallucination as Pi is dying, but metaphorically, the island ties into the reason behind storytelling; to keep hope and faith alive.

The imagination of the reader is tested with the island and whether or not the readers have belief and faith in Pi and his story itself.

At the end of the book in Part three, Pi is interrogated by the Japanese about the sinking of the Tsimtsum. The readers and Japanese are given two version of the story, he one that Pi tells us with the animals, where Pi is able to survive with Richard Parker though he has already killed the hyena and the one where Pi is actually Richard Parker and his mother is killed by the French cook, and Pi actually kills and eats the cook. It is here where the theme of storytelling is reiterated. Pi tells his recount, yet it is not believed. With the stories with the animals, the idea of moral standards is presented. If the animals one is true, Pi was not a cannibal and didn’t turn to animal instincts to survive. Yet, Pi never actually tells the readers which one is true. Pi simply asks the Japanese investigators “Which is the better story, the story with the animals, or the story without animals?”(Martel 317). They both agree that the animal one does. The idea that Pi asks not which one is more believable, but which one is better, proves the theme of storytelling. As people, in order to deal with the cruelty and horrible events that occurs in reality. By giving two stories, he shows that as humans, we choose what story to believe in order to fit what we as humans want it to be. The animal story copes better with us and the Japanese because if the human’s story were true, the idea that human morality is thrown out the window and the idea that when put in a life or death situation, animalistic nature in humans will prevail. In the last few chapters of the book, Pi seems to imply that the animalistic one is a way to cope with the evil he has committed and the cope with the tragedy he has survived. Just as in human nature, we exclude the evils from life and come up with better stories to cope with the evils of reality, Pi uses animals as an escape from his true evilness. Pi says in response to Mr. Okamoto’s answer to his story question simply with “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”(Martel 317) This quote implies that regardless of the true or believable story, only God to Pi knows the truth and his belief in God not only helped him survive the days, but even the activities of evil performed. Even in the end of the novel with the frame narrative about the report about the sinking of the Tsimtsum, he states the following quote. "As an aside, story of sole survivor, Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger."(319) This idea drives the theme of storytelling and how the better stories to Mr. Okamoto is the one he chooses as less upsetting and tragic and more believable in human morality, hope and faith.

Just as the Japanese draw the comparison between Pi’s two different versions of the stories with the animals being the humans. Martel himself had his own reasons. “I finally settled upon the choice that in retrospect seems the obvious one: a tiger. The other animals in the lifeboat ? the zebra, the hyena and the orangutan ? Arose naturally, each one a function of a human trait I wanted to embody, the hyena cowardliness, the orangutan maternal instincts and the zebra exoticism.”(Martel “How I wrote Life of Pi) Just as we draw the comparison between the humans and the animals, Martel himself used those animals to draw the comparison between animals and humans by choosing animals with connotations to human traits.

With all this, storytelling is weaved throughout the novel. As seen above, storytelling is very subjective and biased. An objective unbiased factual account cannot be told in human language. Also, the translated Japanese portions and the report as well have all been translated, causing another screen of bias. Storytelling allows for the human imagination to think of the goodness and morality of people. Each one of Pi’s stories gives us a different truth, the physical truth and the metaphorical emotional truth of life and coping with it. Even as children, fairytales and fables are told to us to teach a lesson about morals of human behavior. Through narratives such as these, lessons about the human self can be learned and storytelling enables humans to use their imagination and their believability in faith and hope.

Work Cited

Duyfhuizen, Bernard. Narratives of Transmission. New Jersey: Associated University Presses,1992.

This book deals with all types of narratives and what the pros and cons of each one are. In particular to the novel, diary narratives, opening frame of narration, and framing prefaces. On diary narratives, he expands upon the idea of unreliability of the narrator in a diary .The idea of making contact with the self in narratives is explained. He comments on the idea that “Diaries are private texts”(76) and the idea presented by Franz Stranzel that there is a difference between “…the ‘narrating self’ and the ‘experiencing self’ characterized within narration.”(77) He exerts the opinion that reading diaries help readers and the narrators of the diaries themselves learn about their self and the behavior of the self. In regards to opening frames of narration, the idea that “…it sometimes takes quite a while to discover that both the frame and the tale are counterfeit.”(133)The idea of authenticity and authority in developing a fictional author’s position. In this chapter, Susan Lancer states the idea that without markings of a separate narrator from the fictional one, the equation “ author= narrator” is what readers expect.(135) In relation to framing prefaces such as author notes, Duyfhuizen states that “How a transmissible text comes to be transmitted is always a narrative problem-one that sometimes requires the framing narrative and the framed tale to merge in interpretively significant ways.”(159) In general, this book introduces the idea of narratives and how they interact with interpretation, authority, and how human nature reads them.

Cooper, Pamela.Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 326: Booker Prize Novels, 1969-2005. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Merritt Moseley, University of North Carolina at Asheville. Gale, 2006. pp. 334-341.

This critical review is composed by Cooper from many resources from interviews with Martel to review written about not just Life of Pi, but about Martel himself. This article talks about the plot in detail and also about themes brought up in the novel. The article brings up this quote from the very end of the book "As an aside, story of sole survivor, Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger."(319) This quote leads her into her leap about imagination and plausibility of Pi’s journey. This idea of fiction versus plausibility is weaved throughout this article. The island is a leap of faith into the fantasy. The author also asserts that at the core, this novel is about religion and how “ Martel gives his hero an apostolic character; he centralizes love as a value and implies the power of faith to overcome apparent impossibilities.” The articles expands on the use of animals and how the story is overall between the alpha male ,Pi and the omega male, Richard Parker. The assertion that both human and animal are pushed to the brink of their powers of endurance, confronting the horrors of abandonment and starvation, turn to cannibalism. The relationship between Richard Parker and Pi is discussed in great detail as well.

Martel, Yann. “How I Wrote Life of Pi.”Powells.com .2007. 13 March 2007. <http://www.powells.com/fromtheauthor/martel.html>.

This article by the author himself depicts how he wrote Life of Pi and why he wrote it. It goes into great detail about his influence, inspiration, and hard work. Influence focuses on how he read a novel by HYPERLINK "http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?perpage=100&author=Moacyr%20Scliar" Moacyr Scliar with the same premise, but was not received well. Martel starts to think and analyze why and how with such a perfect premise, the book didn’t work. He states that he moved on and wrote his first novel. With two mediocre sellers under his author’s pen, in India, surrounded by multiple religions and animals, rethought of that novel by Scliar and was inspired. Images flowed through his head and he decided to stay in India and write the book. The hard work part of this article depicts how he picked the animals and what he wanted them to represent. After much though, the tiger was decided upon, along with the hyena, the orangutan, and the zebra. Each one stood for a human trait he wanted to show, the tiger as power, the hyena as cowardliness, the zebra as exoticism, and the orangutan as motherly instinct. This article also explains the idea of the Frenchman and the meerkats, with giving very useless explanations with a simple he didn’t know where they came from. This article by Yann Martel helps explain his thought and premise behind the book.