I really enjoyed our class discussion on the strong imagery in Life of Pi and I think it is useful way to get students thinking about what is important in the text. For me the most striking image of the novel occurs on page 177 when Pi contemplates the sudden appearance of Richard Parker into his visual landscape:

The sudden appearance of a tiger is arresting in any environment, but it was all the more so here. The weird contrast between the bright, striped living orange of his coat and the inert white of the boat’s hull was incredibly compelling. My overwrought senses screeched to a halt.

This image is so powerfully juxtaposed that it is almost as if Martel wrote the whole novel around showcasing this bizarre but poignant moment. While it strongly reminds me of Blake’s “tyger burning bright” Richard Parker is not “in the forests of the night” but instead in a twenty six foot lifeboat. This seems entirely unnatural especially because both Blake and Martel work very hard to depict the tiger as a ferocious perfect machine of blood and muscle. In Martel’s case it serves to further underscore the absurdity of the situation. If we take this image to be central to the novel I think we can think of Life of Pi as a sort of “Theatre of the Absurd.” Although the term itself describes a particular genre of plays written in the 1940’s – 60’s I think it might be helpful to borrow some of its ideas namely that “man’s plight is purposeless in an existence out of harmony with its surroundings.” (Albert Camus from The Myth of Sisyphys)
As we explore the novel further there are even more images, scenes, and situations which seem utterly absurd:
– Page 71 with the three wise men all meeting Pi and his family at the same time
– Fish flying through the air
– Pi’s list on page 162 which states: 1 boy with a complete set of light clothing but for one lost shoe, 1 spotted hyena, 1 Bengal tiger, 1 lifeboat, 1 ocean, 1 God
– Meerkats and the teeth-fruit tree on the island
– The smell of Cumin representing the ocean on page 220
– Instructions on how to a wild animal while on a boat, Page 224

Although explaining Life of Pi using the principals of the Theatre of the Absurd might not be a perfect fit, it can be used as a way into the novel. Pi Patel is very spiritual which does not fit with the “Absurdist” articulation of a godless world, however he is caught in an apparently hopeless situation in which he has very little control. I think it might be interesting to introduce students to a variety of literary theories and genre conventions and see what connections they could make to the text.

http://www.theatredatabase.com/20th_century/theatre_of_the_absurd.html