4.2 Reading Journal on Life of Pi
4.2 Reading Journal on Life of Pi
--Pan Fan
Reading time: 2 weeks
Objective: To understand the main characters and the background of the story
Part II: Chapters 7 to 16
Reading time: 2 weeks
Goal: Follow the main character's adventures and explore his interactions with animals
Part III: Chapters 17 to 26
Reading time: 2 weeks
Goal: To understand the development of the protagonist's relationship with the tiger and his survival on the boat
Part IV: Chapters 27 to 38
Reading time: 2 weeks
Goal: Explore the protagonist's encounter with Richard Parks, and their dialogue and arguments
Part V: Chapters 39 to 49
Reading time: 2 weeks
Goal: To learn about the protagonist's life on the island and his time with the animals
Part 6: Chapters 50 to 64
Reading time: 2 weeks
Goal: Follow the main character's journey at sea and explore the trust and co-operation between him and Richard Parkers
Part 7: Chapters 65 to 77
Reading time: 2 weeks
Goal: To understand the protagonist's changing psychology and beliefs, and his eventual break with the tiger
Part 8I: Chapter 78 to the end
Reading time: 2 weeks
Goal: Summarise the story and think about the themes and meanings involved
II Why I Chose This Novel😍
After watching the movie adaptation of the book, I developed an interest in reading the original. Another thing that attracts me to read the book is a quote from the back cover of the book. It goes like:
"I'm Pi, adrift on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean, my only mate, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. How that happened is a long story, so let's not talk about it. Right now I've got one thing on my mind, how to deal with this Richard. Parker the tiger.
Option number one: push him off the lifeboat. What good would that do? The tiger's a good swimmer. He'll climb back into the boat and make me pay for my betrayal.
Option number two: kill him with six morphine syringes. Will he be good enough to let me inject 6 morphine syringes in a row? No way, I'll just have to stab him with a needle and that will be rewarded with a tiger slap.
Option number three: attack him with every weapon I can find. Ridiculous. I'm not Tarzan of the Apes.
Option number four: strangle him. A clever suicide plan.
Option number five: poison him, burn him, electrocute him. How? With what?
Option number six: wage a war of attrition. All I have to do is submit to the merciless laws of nature and I'll be saved. Wait for him to weaken and die. But let me be honest. I'll let you in on a secret: part of me is glad to have Richard Parker. Part of me is glad to have Richard Parker. Part of me doesn't want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he did, I'd have to face despair alone, and that's a worse enemy than a tiger. So I had it:
Option number seven: keep him alive."
The tense setting drives me to dig into the story. Besides, both the novel and the film contain a lot of philosophical and theological metaphors that are not immediately apparent. Reading Life of Pi will help me understand the story better and appreciate Yann Martel's skill as a writer. He not only tells a fantastic story but also writes so beautifully that I can’t help copying entire paragraphs in my notebook.
III Character/Plot Development👉👈
Part 1: Pi's teenage years
The first part of the novel is about Pi's teenage years - his zoo family, the jokes about his name and the origin of "Pi", his multiple faiths - which are the pretext for the whole novel. Pi comes from a very unique and fascinating background: the son of a zoo director, a Hindu, a Christian and an Islamist. His dad runs a colourful zoo in Pondicherry, a French territory in India, and Pi's time out of school as a child is spent almost exclusively on the animals. It’s an experience that is not only a fond memory of his childhood, but one that has also shaped his outlook on life.
Part 2: 227 days adrift on the ocean with a tiger🐅
After the shipwreck, Pi has to spend 227 days with a Bengal tiger adrift in the Pacific Ocean. The relationship between Pi and the tiger - from opposition, taming to coexisting - is fascinating and exciting. The line between reality and imagination blurs, and the appearance of Cannibal Island makes the novel magical. However, if the novel ended with Pi's rescue, it would be at best an exciting adventure story.
Part 3: an alternative version of the story
It's the short third part that gives new meaning to the earlier reading. Two Japanese investigators question Pi's story. Then Pi tells "another story", which is so brutal that it doesn't live up to the novel's "Happy Ending". In the other story, it is not Pi and the three animals who end up in the lifeboat, but four living people, including his mother, but only Pi survives. Not only does he watch his mother being killed, but he has to eat human flesh to survive! Rather than the animals in the first story being metaphors for people, it is more appropriate to say that the people in the second story have varying animalistic qualities. It is this second story that makes the readers understand the book in a whole new way.
IV The Author's Life and Times🙍
Author Yann Martel was a Canadian writer who was known for his philosophical, religious, and moral reflections in his works. One of his most famous novels, Life of Pi, was published in 2001 and gained a lot of attention and discussion due to its themes and imagery that are closely related to the real-world social and political scenarios.
In a 2002 interview with Jan Martel on American public television, the author revealed that he was inspired to write the novel because he was looking for a story that could have a direct impact on his life. He was feeling lonely and needed direction in his life, and this novel helped him find that purpose. Martel also mentioned that the book was inspired by a review of Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar's 1981 novel Max and the Cat, which is about a Jewish-German refugee who travels across the Atlantic Ocean in a lifeboat.
| Yann Martel |
V Resilience Shown in the Novel✊✊
The author shows Pi's growth from two aspects: survival and faith. Pi’s resilience in coping with tough situations is self-evident. However, this kind of Jedi survival and tiger companion bridge to show the character's resilience is too shallow, and the author, who has a background in philosophy and theology, would not just show the protagonist's resilience and growth in this way. What is more worth discovering is that Pi's spiritual light. The author demonstrates this resilience by showing his change of attitude towards both religion and science in a desperate situation.
✱ Striving to survive
The part of Pi's sea drifting focuses on Pi's resilience to survive. Pi's process of drifting on the sea and getting along with the tiger is a process of managing and balancing insecurity in a difficult situation.
✱ Balancing his faith in science and religion and unifying three religions🙏
A question perplexes Pi for a long time: are science and religion at odds with each other or do they have boundaries? He also questions: "Love is hard to believe, ask any lover, Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist, God is hard to believe, ask any believer."
Pi’s faith for science comes from Mr Satisg Kumar, Pi's zoology teacher, who is a staunch atheist. Being an Islamist, he was cured of polio. It was Western medicine, rather than his religion, that saved him. Since then, he converted to science. With the influence from teachers like Mr Satisg Kumar, Pi believes in the power of science. When Pi responded to a question from a Japanese official, he said something that shows his love of science: "I applied my reason at every moment. The reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping a tiger away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater." Pi survived 227 days in the Pacific Ocean. On faith alone, of course, he would have died long ago. Science teaches him to rationalize the rationing of food and fresh water; it teaches him how to catch fish and turtles; the science in the life-saving manuals saves Pi from making many mistakes, and his knowledge of animal domestication enables him to eventually make peace with Richard Parker, the tiger.
However, Pi was confused: is science the only truth? Is religion pure superstition? Later he came to understand that science has boundaries. the relationship between religion and science, as exemplified by the fact that his name is pi. pi is an irrational number, 3.141526535... The series after the ellipsis is infinite. This is something that drives many mathematicians crazy, but it became Pi's "refuge". Because it made Pi realize that science can't explain everything, otherwise there wouldn't be irrational numbers like Pi. Pi's name proves that there are numbers that are beyond the imaginary boundaries of scientists and cannot be fully understood, and in life, there are even more things that science cannot explain. This is where the power of religious faith comes into play. After the Tsimtsum shipwreck, Pi finds himself dangling from the oars, suspended above the Pacific Ocean. There are tigers in front of him, a storm behind him, and a school of sharks beneath him. If Pi had looked to reason for answers then, he would have given up and jumped overboard long ago. He would have drowned before being devoured by a shark or a tiger. Reason cannot overcome fear, and it cannot overcome doubts. Religion, God, and faith are the only things that can give Pi the strength he needs, and all three of Pi's religions play a huge role in his life as a drifter.
Hinduism
The first religion of Pi is Hinduism, from which he discovered the first function of religion: it is a filter of reality, a benchmark for interpreting all things in the world. In Pi's own words"The universe makes sense to me through Hindu eyes." Hinduism allows Pi to perceive the world, not just see it. So later in the text, he finds beauty in the endless sea and sky, he recounts fishing story after fishing story, he writes in his diary about his unique experiences, he perceives and describes the floating island as he sees it, and Pi compares his experience of traveling on a Tsimtsum to that of a lifeboat, which he feels quite differently. He says that the Tsimtsum drove so fast that he mistook the sea for nothing but whales and dolphins. But as he drifted slowly in the lifeboat, he found oysters, water plants, host animals, and other wonders. If Pi hadn't been a Hindu, the world he saw would have been just as discolored as the sea he saw on Tsimtsum.
Christianity:
Pi was introduced to Christianity when he met Father Martin in a trip. Jesus Christ completely turned Pi's understanding of a God upside down. How could a god be like a human being, who not only preaches and explains, but also ends up being brutally killed? Pi had countless questions about Jesus, and in the end, all of them turned into one answer - love, which was Father Martin's answer. Father Martin's patience and kindness to Pi taught him the greatness of love, and the power of love, and gave him the power of love. and the power of love gave him inner peace. So later, when Pi was struggling to survive at sea, he remembered Jesus' teaching: Love your enemy; when he is hungry, feed him; when he is thirsty, give him water to drink. So Pi treated Richard Parker the same way, not only giving him fish to eat but also saving fresh water for him to drink. At the same time, he felt Jesus' love for him at sea, most notably in the beginning when a large swordfish unexpectedly swooped into the boat, and later when schools of flying fish "fell from the sky", as well as a constant stream of turtles.
Islam:
Pi's final introduction is to Islam. Once, when he returned home after listening to his Islamic teacher Kumar's explanation, the road, the sea, the trees, the air, and the sun, which used to be unrelated to Pi, suddenly began to talk to Pi in the same language at the same time. He felt quiet and peaceful. Pi says after coming into contact with , Kumar, "I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion." The significance of Islam for Pi may be that it teaches Pi how to live with God, how to approach God, and how to fight against the evil within himself. One of the highlights of the book, in chapters 23-25, is a scene in which the elders of the three religions accidentally meet Pi at the same time, which is brilliantly written.
What is the meaning of religion? Pi discovers this step by step, and it is precise because he discovers the unity of religions and the differences between them and he insists in practicing all three religions. In short, the three seemingly contradictory religions slowly become more and more harmonious in Pi's eyes, and they all allow Pi to better understand the world and himself. Since then, Pi no longer sees the different religions as separate from each other, but as a unified whole.
Without either science or religion, Pi would not have survived. Pi realizes that religion and science are not contradictory but have their boundaries. Furthermore, he internalizes the cores of all the three religions. This is the best demonstration of Pi's resilience.
VI An Analysis of the Work in Psychological Perspective😼
When it comes to psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud has to be quoted. His insights into "id", "ego" and "superego" will be applied into my analysis. Id represents the instincts humans have as an animal. Superego is shaped in the society which is exhibited in moral and ethical thoughts. Ego exists between the primitive needs and the moral and ethical beliefs that balance the opposing needs of the ego and the superego. The id is a primal instinct that follows us from birth. The ego and superego are developed through acceptance, identification, and adaptation in the environment in which people grow up, and eventually form a complete personality. Pi’s drifting journey clears shows his struggles among id, ego and superego.
Sigmund Freud
✱ Birth of id
Under any conditions, the primary consideration of any animal is to survive, the desire for life, the thirst for food, the possession of things and objects, and so on. Instinct, as an animal, is inherent from the moment of birth.
A cargo ship is caught in a storm. Pi does not succeed in rescuing his family but is thrown into a lifeboat by a sailor. With the wind and waves, he manages to escape from the sunken freighter. After sobering up, Pi began to drift aimlessly in the sea with the lifeboat. In addition to Pi, there is a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger on the lifeboat. After a fight, the Bengal tiger became the final winner. Here, the ocean symbolizes the objective world, and the drift symbolizes life. The Bengal tiger, which survived the fight, symbolizes the birth of the "Self". From this moment onwards, it will start traveling along with Pi in the vast ocean of life.
✱The conflicts between Pi and Bengal Tiger: The struggle between id and superego
Id (Bengal Tiger) and superego (i.e. Pi) are strict opposites. The primal desires of the id are always unconsciously aroused and frequent in the early years of a person's life and are constantly suppressed by the superego over and over again. Pi and the Bengal tiger started a long sea drift with the lifeboat. The relationship between them is constantly changing.The Bengal tiger drives and attacks Pi, but Pi is reluctant to kill the Bengal tiger due to moral considerations. The two sides are thus at loggerheads for some time.
✱ The Emergence of the Ego
Id and superego are in perpetual opposition and can only be compromised by another force, the ego. The ego acts as a mediator between the two sides and takes appropriate measures to deal with the conflict between id and superego according to the reality of the situation. For example, we are eating in a restaurant and the food is not yet ready. The customers at the neighboring table are eating well, and although we are hungry, we don't go and eat directly from the neighboring table. We turn our heads and urge the waiter to serve the food as soon as possible or order some other snack. This is the ego's way of responding when our desires are suppressed by morality and ethics.
After several days of stalemate, Pi, to compromise such a relationship, goes to the extent of constructing a pontoon by himself using a life vest and a fishing net, and after attaching it to the lifeboat, he stays alone on the pontoon to obtain a brief coexistence with the Bengal tiger. Pi then begins to realize that the long hours at sea have left him physically and mentally exhausted and disillusioned. The presence of the Bengal tiger is the "Sword of Damocles", which seems to tighten the last string for him. Pi has the idea of taming the Bengal tiger, so he returns to the lifeboat and uses his domestication skills to "conquer" the tiger.
✱ The Formation of a Stable Personality
The conflicts between the id and the superego and the reconciliation of the ego are intricate and interactive, which ultimately lead to the formation of a stable personality. The id is suppressed by the superego. It will gradually go within and no longer be easily visible. The stable shaping of the ego replaces the id and superego and reveals itself in our daily life behavior, thus implying the final formation of the personality. In this process, the id does not disappear with time. The unfulfilled desires of the id are hidden in the depths of the heart and become the so-called subconscious mind.
Through the taming of Pi, some "friendly treaties" are formed with the Bengal tiger. For example, they define their own space and cooperate to get food. Pi even restrains the Bengal tigers by whistling and physically restraining them, and so on. For once, they seemed to have become "friends" and struck a balance of coexistence. The good times don't last long when a sudden storm nearly sinks the lifeboat. When Pi regains consciousness, he discovers that he has drifted to the coast of Mexico. Before Pi realizes, the Bengal tiger, without looking back, walks towards a distant jungle and soon disappears. Pi was rescued by the local people, but at this moment Pi felt very sad because the tiger was just so reckless and quietly left. Actually, the “tiger” within him never left.
Apart from the interaction of id, ego and superego, Life of Pi also discusses other psychological subjects like “projection” and “behaviorism”. For example, when Pi was a child, he was particularly interested in the Bengal tiger. Pi tried to approach it, and Pi saw trust in the Bengal tiger's eyes. But Pi's father stopped him and said, "What you see in him (trust) is just a projection of what you see in yourself". The domestication of the Bengal tiger by Pi in the lifeboat is one of the psychological schools of "behaviorism".
VII Contrasts and analogies👻
✱ Life of Pi and other adventure stories
When I was in primary school, I read Robinson Crusoe over and over again, and imagined myself drifting to an island, grinding wheat, raising parrots and wearing sheepskin. Imagining Robinson open up a wild vineyard for himself, proudly saying that it was his villa, I was simply thrilled. Later on, the set of books I love most was The Adventures of Hal Roger. The main character of the two brothers of the "adventure" go to the ant's cave, the ice and snow kingdom, meet the swallow sister and parrot mother-in-law. They become smaller in the story, but the characters are definitely not small. They are wise enough to capture the gorilla, track down the cannibalism of the lion, the tricky capture of white elephants, and mistakenly enter the cannibalism of the country ... These books fascinated me a lot as a child. For me, Life of Pi is another Adventures of Hal Robertson or Robinson Crusoe. These three stories are kind of "archetypal" in public literature, that is, "the brave man who survives under the desperate circumstances", and for thousands of years, even the most wonderful stories have been recurring in artistic creations. Any artistic creation is essentially the re-creation of an archetype. The evolution of a story is the process of repeating the archetypes, but not sticking to them, seeking breakthroughs and transcendence, and ultimately being constrained by the archetypes.
The breakthrough of Life of Pi in comparison to the first two is the second version of the story. Hyenas, zebras, orangutans, are in fact human beings. They represent the French cook, the Chinese sailor, and his mother. In the end, he is the only one left alive: the cook eats the sailor, kills his mother, and kills the cook. And he probably eats the cook's flesh as well. The most dangerous and greatest enemy, Richard the Bengal tiger, is no one else but himself. The psychological depth of Life of Pi is the reason why it is different from normal jungle survival stories. To quote the famous director Ang Lee"In the bottom of everyone's heart, there is a Richard Parker. It will appear in times of danger, roaring, gawking at people, yet clinging to them. " Similar psychological thinking occurs everywhere. When the Japanese journalists questions the authenticity of his story, Pi gives his insights into storytelling and authenticity. He believes that every narration turns into a story, and in the process of understanding something, people add something to it, making life a story. "The world is not what it was meant to be. It is what we understand it to be, isn't it? In the process of understanding something, we add something, don't we? Doesn't that make life a story?" (P329)
✱ Animals in the eyes of man
There is a concept in the novel called "animals in the eyes of man". When Pi was little, he said to his father that the tiger had a soul and that he could see it when he looked into its eyes. His father says, "No, tigers don't have souls. When you look into their eyes, you don't see anything but your reflection. Because you are a human being, you observe the animal according to the perspective of a human being, and you see cool human characteristics in the animal, but the animal can still only be an animal, it cannot be a human being. Loving animals is loving people, and believing in animals is believing in people.” Gradually Pi learns that "An animal is an animal. They are very different from us, both in nature and in fact. I learned this lesson twice: once from my father and once from Richard Parker." In the article, the tiger was never close to Pi, but Pi was sad for the rest of his life when the tiger left and didn't look back. It wasn't the tiger that hurt Pi, but "the tiger in Pi's eyes", and Pi had imposed his feelings on Richard Parker, forgetting that Richard Parker was just a tiger after all. So he is disappointed.
Pictures of Life of pi
Pictures of Life of pi
In fact, the first version of the story is an insinuation, the tiger insinuates the beast in man, and the process of Pi's taming of Richard Parker is a struggle between humanity and the beast. Life advances in the struggle between humanity and bestiality. Richard Parker left Pi mercilessly, and Pi cried sadly because he attempted to do something that could not possibly succeed and failed: to use humanity to understand bestiality. This is something people do every day, for example, with "crime". We always find a reasonable motive for a crime, no matter it’s for money or for love. If a criminal simply enjoys the pleasure of committing a crime, it’s scary. People will start to trace back to the childhood of the criminal and tries find an excuse for his brutality. Humanity once again understands the bestiality, and people are relieved to be able to go on living. The second version unveils another truth: What is scarier than an animal is a human being.
VIII Sentence starters - My opinion of the name Pi is…👾
Pi is an irrational number, 3.1415926535... The series after the ellipsis is endless. This has driven many mathematicians mad, but it has been Pi's "refuge". Because it made Pi realise that science can't explain everything, otherwise there wouldn't be irrational numbers like Pi. Later in the novel, in response to a question from a Japanese official, Pi said something that struck me as a contrast between love of science and faith: “I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”
So the name Pi is partly indicative of the author's attitude towards science and religion, that religion and science are not contradictory, but have their own boundaries, and the name Pi proves that there are numbers beyond the boundaries of the scientist's imagination that cannot be fully understood, and that in life there are even more things that science cannot explain. This is where the power of religious beliefs come into play.
IX Questions to consider - What makes you wonder in this book? What confuses you?👿
What is the island? What kind of reality does it reflect?
In the original story, there is one incident in Pi's first story that breaks the beautiful tone. Pi discovers the scary truth about the island that it devours human beings who stepped on it. Many people have interpretations, for example, from the shape of the island, some associate it with Vishnu, others with pi's mother.
The novel is incoherent about the island, and I can't say for sure what the author had in mind, but I think Ang Lee's interpretation might actually be Vishnu. This is because he inserts the character of pi's girlfriend, who dances with a gesture that indicates a lotus blooming in the forest, which corresponds to pi's discovery of the island; in addition, pi ties the red rope given by his girlfriend to a branch on the island. As I see, there may not really be any reality to go along with it. The island may actually be a hallucination brought on by the fear of starvation. What characterises the island? Apparently it is harmonious and rich, but at night it transforms into a cannibalistic monster. Therefore I suspect that the psychological basis of these hallucinations is that one can pretend to be innocent but the conscience will still comes out from time to time to sting you, like teeth in a flower, and tell the truth.
X Alternative responses - Choose a character of the book, decide what would be an appropriate birthday present for that character and explain why.👻
If I were to prepare a present for Pi’s birthday, I may give him a beautiful tiger model, because he has formed a bond with the image of the tiger, and the tiger model can remind him of the remarkable adventures he had. After he integrates into the real world, the trials and tribulations he once suffered make him live on with peace and confidence without fearing any challenges.
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