Life of Pi: The Story

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Life of Pi The Story
1. The Authors Note2. Part I3. Part II
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So, what is the novel trying to say about global
relations?

• Is it attempting to suggest international
  community in a global world through the coming
  together of people, nations, and religions?
• Is it attempting to suggest the insurmountable
  conflicts that come with a global
  worldskirmishes, border wars, death,
  dislocation, confrontation?
• Does it even sustain the allegory, or is the
  global allegory just suggested and then dropped
  and dispersed?

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Yann Martel, Interview with Canadian Press
Newswire, September 26, 2002

• Its a big, beautiful planet. It really, really
  is. There are so many ways of being, dressing,
  eating. Im insatiably hungry about it. Not
  that I claim to understand it.

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Life of Pi and Realism Getting animals used to
the presence of humans is at the heart of the art
and science of zookeeping. The key aim is to
diminish an animals flight distance, which is
the minimum distance at which an animal wants to
keep a perceived enemy. A flamingo in the wild
wont mind you if you stay more than three
hundred yards away. Cross that limit and it
becomes tense. Get even closer and you trigger a
flight reaction from which the bird will not
cease until the three-hundred-yard limit is set
again, or until heart and lungs fail. Different
animals have different flight distances and they
gauge them in different ways. Cats look, deer
listen, bears smell. Giraffes will allow you to
come to within thirty yards of them if you are in
a motor car, but will run if you are 150 yards
away on foot. Fiddler crabs scurry when youre
ten yards away howler monkeys stir in their
branches when youre at twenty African buffaloes
react at seventy-five. Life of Pi (Chapter 9
43).
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• Yann Martel says he does not like exoticism in
  fiction and finds weirdness fatiguing. Which is
  pretty weird, given that he has just won the
  Booker prize with a story about a Hindu Christian
  Muslim boy who spends nearly half a year in a
  lifeboat in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger.
• The Guardian, October 23 2002

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Examples of Magic Realism in Global Culture

• Moacyr Scliars Max and the Cats (1981)
• Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amelie (2001)

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Life of Pi Magic
Its a god on too human a scale, thats what.
There are miracles, yes, mostly of a medical
nature . . . If that is magic, it is minor
magic, on the order of card tricks. Any Hindu
god can do a hundred times better. Life of Pi
(Chapter 17 61)
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Life of Pi and Magic Realism

• She came floating on an island of bananas in a
  halo of light, as lovely as the Virgin Mary. The
  rising sun was behind her. Her flaming hair
  looked stunning.
• I cried, Oh blessed Great Mother,
  Pondicherry fertility goddess, provider of milk
  and love, wondrous arm spread of comfort, terror
  of ticks, picker-up of crying ones, are you to
  witness this tragedy too? Its not right that
  gentleness meets horror. Better that you had
  died right away. How bitterly glad I am to see
  you. You bring joy and pain in equal measure.
• . . . We can sit together. You can have
  the window seat, if you want. (Chap 42 pg. 123)

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Why Magic Realism?
1. Magic realism is suited to psychologically
intense novels that explore a state of mind not
disciplined by the rules of convention and
logic. 2. Magic realism is suited to
post-colonial themes, those novels trying to set
themselves and their imaginary apart from the
colonial Western tradition. 3. More
philosophically, magic realism explores the idea
that reality is in fact fantasy. Reality is the
construct of nations, communities, histories,
personalities, and literatures.