The Life of Pi (revised)

The Life of Pi (revised)

         The story opens in India. Where a boy named Pi lives with his family. His father owns a zoo, and Pi helps with maintaining the zoo. Pi is very cultured and practices Islam, Hindu, and Christianity.  As the story unfolds you find out that Pi’s father is not making enough money from the zoo, and is in the red. Because of this Pi’s family decides to sell the animals and move to Canada. They move there on a large Cargo ship with some of their animals on-board too, the ones going to Canada. In the middle of the night Pi hears an explosion and goes up on desk to find the ship sinking. He then hops in a life boat that is already in habited with a 450 pound tiger. He survives out on sea for more than 200 days.

In this story the main, and probably the only protagonist is Pi. Pi is able to survive mostly because of hi previous knowledge of maintaing a zoo and the supplies and survival book he found on the life boat. Pi <br> keeps himself alive and the tiger he is sharing a life-boat with.

There are two antagonists. The first one, which is the obvious one is the tiger. But the tiger has a deeper layer to it. The tiger is not only the antagonist, but a bit of a protagonist, because without the company of the tiger Pi may have gone mad, and he did go a little mad, but without the tiger he may have not survived at all.

The other antagonist was Pi’s hunger, survival, and will to live. In the beginning Pi was certain that a boat would just come to rescue Pi, and he just had to survive till then, but as the days grew longer, it was hard to keep going. Though he still managed to fight off giving up, for his, and his tiger’s sake.

I think there really are two meanings of this story, one of them being anything can happen. Being stuck on a life boat for more than 200 days, and surviving. Finding a surreal island that is carnivorous, and surviving. All these things     d not normally happen, but anything can happen.

The other meaning is don’t give up- Pi is on a ship for months, and months, with very little hope, but he never gives up. Never. It is a message that is easily seen, but does make sense.

Concluding, this is an amazing page-turner, that keeps your eyes glued to the pages even with the limited setting, and characters. For most of the book it only uses one setting, being the ocean, and for most of the book it only has one human character, and one animal. The story is original, and I recommend it to anyone who likes good gripping books.

(revised version)

Cormac Mason