Finding Himself

Have you ever been stranded, or lost, and had no clue how to get home, or even if you would make it home? Well in Life of Pi this is what Pi lives through for months. Pi, or Piscine Patel, tells two stories about what happened on the stranded boat, but can we trust him? Are the stories that he told true, or is he hiding reality from the innocent minds of human beings?

As I read Life of Pi I wondered could this really happen? Some parts seemed cruel and downright disturbing. Pi tells a story about a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a tiger named Richard Parker. In this story the hyena beheaded the orangutan and killed the already injured zebra. Afterward the tiger, Richard Parker killed the hyena, for he needed to stay alive in this killing war.

Throughout this journey Pi needed to Figure out where he and Richard Parker stood. He had to mark his territory and stay alive, seeing as the tiger was full for a while, but he would become hungry again. He needed to show Richard Parker that he was in fact the boss, and he did. Pi stayed alive and had very little to no problems with the tiger himself. I think that the tiger represents the parts of himself that he has yet to figure out, and that’s why Richard Parker never dies because that part of Pi doesn’t disappear.

In the people version though, he meets a blind man Pi realizes something important. At first I thought that he was real and that the blind man really did eat the leather boot and kill and eat Pi, but then I really thought about it. Pi really didn’t see the blind man. I believe that I was the part of Pi that wanted to give up and saying why do I have to live through this? The blind man makes him think about his life and he shows him that life is worth living, because if he got that far he can live through anything else that comes his way.

Throughout the book, Pi tells two stories about his journey on the lifeboat. Whether these stories are true or not, I don’t know. Neither seems to be true at all, but I don’t think that the story he was trying to tell was that of him on a lifeboat, or whether he was with the animals or with people, but something else. I think that the real story is the one that you have to read between the lines to find. That Pi found himself. He realized that he is strong and can handle anything no matter what life throws at him.