Transcript Life of Pi: Author’s Note

Life of Pi: Author’s Note
HKASL ~ Literature in English
Summary
• The brief, italicized section:
– With some background on the book’s author
– Written himself into the text as a character
– 1996: second trip to India ~ He flew to Bombay to
rejuvenate his mind after learning about the less than
favorable response to his first two books
– Plans: to write a novel about Portugal
– Failed to materialize the book ~ hopeless and
dejected about his prospects
Summary
• Arrived in the town of Pondicherry after a period
•
•
•
•
of wandering
Pondicherry ~ once controlled by the French
Empire
Become self-governing decades ago
The author met by chance a man named Francis
Adirubasamy in a local coffee shop
Francis offered to tell him a story
Summary
• The author called up Mr. Patel [Pi] back in his native
•
•
•
•
Canada
Mr. Patel agreed to meet with him and tell him his own
version of the story
Showed the author documents, including his old diary
and ancient newspaper clippings about his ordeal
Supporting documents received from the Japanese
Ministry of Transport
Author: to write up Mr. Patel’s account using Mr. Patel’s
own voice and looking through his eyes. Any mistakes,
he states, are the author’s own.
Analysis
•
•
•
•
It clues us into the book’s origins
It blurs the boundary between fact and fiction
Claim: the text is nonfiction
In the tradition of picaresque novels
– Example:Don Quixote
– Masquerading as fact even though they are obviously works of
imagination
– Harsh realities of life — poverty, illness, and so on — are treated in a
wry, ironic, and even humorous way
• Serious commentary made by the narrator on everything, from
religion to politics
• Mock-journalistic introduction: the intersection of fact and fiction in
his literary world
Analysis
•
•
•
•
Central theme of the book: storytelling
Two not-so-successful books before
Struck by inspiration during a visit to India
Did Yann Martel really meet Francis Adirubasamy in a
coffee shop?
• Does Pi Patel really exist?
– No
• Martel: creating an imaginary scenario to delight and
•
entice his readers
Foundation for the novel’s central theme:
– Storytelling as a way to get around telling the boring or
upsetting or uninteresting truth
Analysis
• Balanced structurally by Part Three:
another short section concerned with
creating the impression that this entire
book is a work of nonfiction
• To suspend our disbelief and invest
ourselves more fully in the story we are
about to read
Life of Pi: Chapters 1 – 6
Summary
• Beginning: Pi’s declaration ~ his great suffering, leaving him
•
•
•
•
despondent
The nature of his suffering and its source are not yet clear to the
reader
Pi as a very good student in his religious and zoological studies
His religious studies thesis: aspects of Isaac Luria’s cosmogony
theory
Pi’s Speaking about sloths at length and his observation:
– Their very survival ensured by their slow and dull lifestyle
– Disappearance into the background
• Now working, Pi misses India and loves Canada, and he misses
someone named Richard Parker.
Summary
• Pi’s stay at a hospital in Mexico
– Treated exceptionally well
– His ailments—anemia, fluid retention, dark urine, broken skin
– Up and walking in about a week’s time
• Fainted the first time he turned on a water tap and
heard the water rushing forth
• How he felt wounded when a waiter in an Indian
restaurant in Canada criticized him for using his fingers
to eat.
• Narrative briefly switched to the author’s point of view:
– Describing Pi as a small, gray-haired, middle-aged man, who
talks quickly and directly
Summary
• Pi’s narrative: his reflections on his boyhood in
India
– Named after a pool
– Learned to swim from a family friend, Francis
Adirubasamy, whom Pi calls Mamaji
– Mamaji:
• A champion swimmer when he was young
• Instilled in Pi a love for the ritualistic nature of swimming
• His favorite pool in the world: the Piscine Molitor in Paris [it
is after that pool that Pi received his unusual name]
Summary
• Pi’s father: used to run the Pondicherry Zoo
• Pi grew up thinking the zoo was paradise
• The ritualistic habits of zoo creatures:
– The alarm-clock precision of the roaring lions
– The howler monkeys
– The songs that are birds’ daily rites
• Defended zoos against those who would rather the animals were
kept in the wild
– Wild creatures: at the mercy of nature
– Zoo creatures: a life of luxury and constancy
• Pondicherry Zoo is now shut down
• Many people now hold both zoos and religions in disrepute.
Summary
• Teasing Pi received as a child because of his full
name, Piscine
– Other school children turned into Pissing
– Trained his classmates and teachers to call him Pi:
• by writing it on the chalkboard of each of his classrooms
• Briefly switched back to the voice of the author:
Pi’s kitchen in Canada is extremely well-stocked
Analysis
• Foreshadowing something devastating and extraordinary
– Approaching that nameless event from the outside in,
– Providing information about Pi’s life before and after before
getting to the heart of the tragedy itself
– Building up the suspense
– Allowing us to get to know Pi as a normal boy and a fully fleshed
out character, not just as a victim of circumstance
– Drawing readers firmly into the story ~ we want to know:
• Who is Richard Parker?
• What happened to him?
• Pi’s memories of India
Analysis
• Pi’s reference of his thesis on sixteenth-century Kabbalist Isaac
Luria’s cosmogony theory: very important to the book as a whole
• Luria’s theory of creation:
–
–
–
–
–
God contracted to make room for the universe
This contraction: Tsimtsum
Followed by light, carried in five vessels
Shattered vessels causing the sparks of light to sink into matter
God reordered them into five figures, which became the dimensions of
our created reality
• Foreshadowing the main event to come:
– Sinking of the ship, the Tsimtsum
– Giving Pi the room to create his own version of the events that follow
– Five figures that make up reality for Luria ~ five characters on the
lifeboat (including Pi himself) shape Pi’s story [reality Vs. imagination]
Analysis
• Zoo: an important place in Pi’s memory
• Pi’s belief system shaped by growing up in a zoo
– Knowing about animal nature
– Imbued in him the meaning of freedom
– Zoos are places of habit:
• Chores that the keepers must perform every day
• Examples: feeding and cleaning the animals and their cages
• Animal rituals
Analysis
• Pi establishes early on the orderliness of the zoo and the
comforting sense of regularity it gives him
– Animals prefer the consistency of zoo life
– Similarly humans accustom themselves to the rituals and
abundance of modern society [their own sort of zoo]
– Zoo animals rarely run away: they enjoy the abundant water and
food
– Life in the wild: a constant battle for survival + a race against
the odds and other creatures
– Death: a constant presence and possibility
– All of us living in modern society: zoo creatures
• Defanged and protected from the wilderness waiting for us beyond
•
the enclosure walls
Walls from which Pi will soon be freed
Analysis
• Explanations of Pi’s name
– As much text as his philosophizing about zoos
– The watery associations of Piscine Molitor’s
full name:
• Piscine:
– “Pool” in French
– A derivation with pisces, or fish
• Pi learns how to swim from Francis Adirubasamy
• He gravitates toward water
Analysis
• Pi’s name:
– Two functions in the text:
• Emphasizing the idea that a very strong swimmer like Pi
might realistically have survived in the ocean after a
shipwreck
• Pi as an odd name that is has the ring of allegory, positioning
Pi as a mythic or fabled character
– The literal, mathematic symbol pi:
– An almost impossibly long number whose
combinations never repeat
– Symbolizing Pi’s long journey, with all its variations
Analysis
• Amount of energy that Pi devotes to the ideas of
rituals and routine in the lives of zoo creatures:
– Repetition he used to train his schoolmates and
teachers into calling him Pi
• Leaps up during roll call
• Writes his full name on the blackboard
• Underlines his preferred nickname, Pi
• Speaks it aloud
• Carries out this act in each classroom, during every roll call
• To the point where his fellow students start to follow along
– Indication: humans = animals
• Repetition proves to be a very effective teacher