The secret of Life of PI is in the narrator’s opening preamble.  The whole structure and even the ending is contained in the statement:

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imaginations on the alter of crude reality and we end of believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

I will argue in this response that this book is an extended metaphor; that it is a political allegory.  The contrived ending is not so contrived after all; it is an essential part of the story; it is Martel’s ‘crude reality’ and part of his political commentary.  You are not supposed to like the ending, the crude reality he imposes at the end of his story.  This negative reaction should make you ‘support your artists’, so that more endings don’t get sacrificed in this way.

When Pi Patel asks Mr. Okamoto, “So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without the animals?” isn’t he really asking him, ‘hey Okamoto, do you like Art or not.  What’s your thing, Novels or Newspapers?”

Pi Patel’s story has become a mythology with cultural power that a newspaper article could never have.  This is the point Yann Martel makes above when talking about funding for the Arts, and the point he makes again through the voices of his characters.

There is a concept in philosophy that states that if you have two possibilities in your life, and there is no proof for either one definitively, then you are free to choose the one you like, the one that makes you feel the best.  You as a human should choose the optimistic idea because it has the most utility for you, it makes you feel good instead of bad or indifferent.  It doesn’t have to be a belief in God.  I don’t personally believe in God.  I do however believe that on the whole humans are good.  I can’t prove it, but I feel better believing this than that all humans are murdering evil jerks at heart.

Martel offers two possibilities in his book and he presents a choice that costs us nothing to make.  Art or reality?

The origin of these ideas for those interested can be traced to Blaise Pascal (among others) who wrote that:

God is or He is not.  But to which side will we incline?  …  What will you wager?  … You must wager.  It is not optional … Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is.   …  If you win, you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing.  Do not hesitate then; wager that he does exist.

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

It is interesting to consider what role the theme of water plays in Life of Pi.  The effect that water has on Pi is mentioned early in the novel on page 7: “The first time I turned a tap on, its noisy, wasteful, superabundant gush was such a shock that my legs collapsed beneath me and I fainted in the arms of a nurse”.  In addition, Pi is actually named after his “aquatic guru”s favourite swimming pool in Paris, la piscine Molitor.  Martel is careful to show that only Pi is drawn to the water so strongly when he writes that his “parents never took to water” (8).

Instead of analyzing the water theme from only a physical perspective, I would like to explore this theme from a mental or emotional one, mainly in respect to Pi’s subconscious state on his voyage.  There is a common analogy of representing human consciousness with an iceberg.  While the tip of the iceberg can be seen (the conscious mind), there exists a huge amount of ice under water that we cannot see (the subconscious mind).  In her article “Mind over Matter”, Karen Rains, a therapist, explains the iceberg comparison this way: “The conscious mind is the part above the water and the subconscious mind is the vast ocean of “stuff” hiding below.  It contains everything we have ever done, thought, said, imagined, learned, forgotten [or] felt”. (http://ezinearticles.com/Mind-Over-Matter). I believe that Pi’s lifeboat and raft symbolize his conscious mind because that is where he eats, sleeps and shares his time with Richard Parker.

By contrast, the Pacific Ocean may represent Pi’s subconscious mind, as it is an environment over which he has no bodily control.  Furthermore, the water is at times filled with sharks or swirled into threatening storms. While the ocean does provide food and a place for Pi to float his solar stills, it is still his constant enemy.

Finally, is it Pi’s subconscious that metamorphoses the cook, the sailor and Pi’s mother into the animals?  When the “real” world on the boat become just too much for the boy to bear, his subconscious mind protects the conscious one by letting his imagination take over. As soon as Pi reaches Mexico, he no longer need Richard Parker’s company, but he still wishes he had had the chance to say good bye to his friend properly: “ “Richard Parker, it’s over. We have survived. Can you believe it?  I owe you more gratitude than I can express.  I couldn’t have done it without you. . . .Thank you for saving my life” (317).

By being immersed in the “ocean” of his subconscious, Pi draws upon the strengths of his character that he did not know existed back in his simple life in Pondicherry. His ingenuity and resolve to survive, no matter what the conditions, transforms him from a quiet boy into a courageous young man. “You must make adjustments if you want to survive.  Much becomes expendable.  You get your happiness where you can.   You reach a point where you’re at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile of your face, and you feel you’re the luckiest person on earth.  Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish”.

Here follows a link to the TED Lecture by Sir Ken Robinson on how schools discourage creativity:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html .

The Blake Archive, where you may find images of Blake’s prints, may be found here: http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/ .

September 25-October 2 is “banned books” week in the United states. In an article on the NYT Paper Cuts blog, Lela Moore speaks of recent attempts to ban Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, the story of a high school girl who is raped and then ostracized because of rumors about the incident. In such cases Twitter is increasingly being used as a vehicle for opposition. Writes Moore, “Twitter has become, as Anderson told me in an interview, a ‘game changer’ in public discourse” (Moore, 2010, September 28).

While Life of Pi has to the best of my knowledge not yet been formally challenged, it seems the sort of book that might eventually draw the attention of censors on the grounds of its religious content and some depictions of violence. How would you defend this book, or any other book, from potential censorship were it challenged in your classroom? How do we determine whether a book is “appropriate” for young adults and what are the inherent challenges in attempting to do so?

References and relevant links:

Moore, Lela. (2010, September 28). “Twitter: Banned Books’ New Best Friend.” NYT Paper Cuts. Available:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/twitter-banned-books-new-best-friend/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Banned Books Week Website: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/

Comments in Monday’s class regarding how one would engage students in Life of Pi as a whole got me thinking about the possibilities for teaching parts of this novel independently. As Brandon mentioned, the most action-packed aspects of the novel are contained from part 2 on. While I found myself picking out sections from part 1 as my “most compelling” passages, I can easily see how many students (especially those who are in an English class to satisfy a requirement, not a love of English) would find part 1 to be slightly “dry and yeastless”.

I ask this more as a question to the class than a concrete suggestion, but do you think it would be possible to teach on this book without requiring that the entire book be taken into account? While Pi’s reflections on the three faces of the divine come back and inform his struggles on the open ocean, are they necessary to the enjoyment of the story?

To teach the book from a thematic sense, surely that first section is vital. It lays the groundwork for his relationship with Richard Parker, the tension of dominance and subservience in the animal kingdom. It is in section one that much of the framing for the “right” story vs the “good” story comes into play, an idea that very undeniably comes back in the end and turns the entire narrative on its head. But speaking objectively, do you think students would be unable to understand these themes without this section one framing? I believe they could.

I’m loathe to advocate for chopping every novel into digestible morsels. But could it be possible that if you assign from section two through to the end at first read, and generate enough interest in the book as a whole through class discussion and engagement, perhaps more people would look to part one with interest? By piquing their curiosity with vivid discussions of how to tame a tiger, maybe they would open the book again from the beginning with joy, instead of plodding grimly through it at the outset, anxious to get to the “good” part.

Which raises a bigger question: where is our responsibility as an English teacher? Is it with the authors, to treat their books as whole and indivisible? Or is it to our students, to find the best ways to access their critical thinking and to kindle a passion for reading? I’m hesitant to start taking authors’ work to the chopping block, but I very clearly remember spending several classes on Macbeth and only glancing over whole sections, while spending days on his “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. Surely, if the Bard can be subjected to this treatment for the sake of student engagement, the idea ought to be on the table for other works as well.

Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” as a novel is a coming of age story, albeit a highly unusual one in that it is about Pi growing up in extraordinarily strange circumstances and growing into an adult person not only in the absence of family and friends but he endures the trials on the lifeboat alone. These circumstances suggest that Martel is telling a new kind of coming of age story. Coming of age is how one character comes to understand the world and his place in it. Pi’s particular coming of age story is his ordering of the world, the negotiation of the rest of his life and by so doing have the world make sense given the extraordinary trauma he goes through. Pi is in a sense the perfect person to have this sort of ordeal happen to because he already has three distinct ordering principles (survival strategies) to work with: science, religion and storytelling. Which of these does he choose, and which enables him to move on and have a fruitful, happy and productive life?

Pi’s first ordering principle is Science, with Mr. Kumar and his father serving as his mentors. Mr. Kumar (biology teacher/atheist) teaches Pi to value scientific discourse. Reason and objectivity orders Mr. Kumar’s world. He is a lover of the zoo and identifies it as a place of science, a place of order itself (pg 28). Even the language attributed to Mr. Kumar is scientific (pg 28 “take the pulse of the universe, his stethoscopic mind”). Mr. Kumar also mentions his disenchantment with religion on page 30 when he says, “Where is God… God never came… Reason is my prophet.” Meanwhile, Pi’s father practices a philosophical and realist scientific stance. Father identifies a political aspect by marking science with progress. The realities of survival are important to Pi’s father, survival is unemotional and uninvolved with the uncertainty of faith. This realist perspective is more than evident in the brutal lesson he teaches Pi and Ravi with the tiger and the goat.

The second principle Pi adopts to order the world is religion. Reconciling Hinduism, Catholicism, Islam is not hard for Pi because he simply wants to love God and, therefore, he constructs a tripartite union of three religions (“I don’t see why I can’t be all three”). Pi considers this inward reality of the presence of God to be the “finest of rewards” (69), and his religious plurality reflects this thought as an honest attempt to love God as best he can. Each of these religions relies on a distinct narrative while science does not, only relying on reason and logic. Religion is known by Pi with emotion, irrationality, and a kind of unproven belief (faith).

Finally, storytelling is his final ordering principle which, not coincidentally, draws him into science and religion. While Pi’s father teaches him science and modernity, His own mother had a love of books and never did anything to discouraged Pi to read. As it pertains to storytelling, we have to decide what Richard Parker is doing here. We have to first decide if he is real, or figure out what he represents regardless if he is real or not. I interpret Richard Parker as the link between science and religion. Richard Parker is the embodiment of the identity Pi creates in order to survive the devastating loss he has endured and the harsh realities of solitary travel on the Pacific Ocean. The “miracle” (183) of a tiger and human sharing the small quarters of a lifeboat is certainly a good story, but the fact of the matter is, without Richard Parker Pi would lack the necessary will to live. The mind enables him to cope by causing a split in his personality. For example, the act of killing is justified by Richard Parker’s need and brutality. This is the science of the mind which allows Pi to survive. The storytelling or the imagining of Richard Parker allows Pi to do which he would otherwise be unable to do. Here, in fact, what we have is a combination of science and storytelling which work together to help Pi survive.

It is easy to see how religion requires faith. To say that storytelling requires faith also makes sense, as you have to believe that the storey-teller is taking you to the right place. Furthermore, it takes as much of a mental leap to believe into science as it does to have faith in religion. And this may very well be Richard Parker’s function: to serve as a link between the three distinct yet inter-related principles by which Pi orders his world within the framework of a coming of age story to eventually provide Pi, and we as the reader, with a sense of hope at the conclusion of the novel.

The Life of Pi increasingly develops descriptiveness regarding animals, nature, and human connectivity to the parts of a seemingly whole universal interaction. Subsequently, the novel takes a shift from animals to human characterization. But does it? It seems that as the view point and descriptions alter, one is melting into the other – into a realized description of human qualities akin to animalistic behaviour and tendencies. For example, the discussion regarding territoriality and the unsettling reality of animal and human desire for enclosure, (a defined space for residing and expecting particular, constant conditions). Similarly, the language becomes more descriptive towards human animal-like behaviour. For example, when Piscine Patel is called, “Pissing Patel,” we are given an allusion to the snake-like sound of hissing. I am not sure how well students could pick up on this imagery but I think that if it was brought to their attention they would understand the metaphors. Perhaps you could have students discuss personifications of animals they themselves have already thought about in order to get them comparing and contrasting human and animal qualities. This could prepare them for thinking about larger social, political, and economical issues in a framework of larger discourse.

In addition to this discussion on imagery…these are my lesson plan ideas on imagery posted as pdf at this website: http://www.lerc.educ.ubc.ca/fac/dobson/courses/lled449/imagery-pi.pdf

The Article, “Fly at your own Risk” definitely has the format of an article or newspaper report as opposed to the Everest documentaries that follow more of a story line. However, both contain a lot of content and facts that could be difficult for students to remember and recall. This is perhaps the main thing that deters me from non-fiction; trying to remember all the bits and pieces. However, presented the key main ideas and interaction with real life events provides a point for real engagement. The benefits are that the article addresses political, social, and semi-corporate issues that are relevant to Canadians. In this way, students are evaluating and understanding Canadian issues and discussing policies and so forth. There is opportunity to use this text to cover a multi-disciplinary text evaluation. Furthermore, some students may even have family members or friends who fly and can make personal connections to the material. In this ability to personalize the texts students, can perhaps intimate with the text and the text can make a deeper impact in terms of learning material. My question is what is the emphasis of the text? Are students to understand the main idea or to remember the facts and follow the investigative discovery outlined by the journalist? Regardless, I think that this gives student a good perspective on journalism and how they can write and back up what they are saying factually. Often times, students are unsure how to back themselves up when it is based on ideas or what they are taking from the authors. In this way, the article gives a practical application to writing and communicating information. Also, it forces students to read deeply and to critically follow the argument being presented because of the amount of factual detail in the text.

In speaking with Carol Shaben about her non-fiction writing recently, she reflected briefly on her experience giving writing workshops in a local high school. She remarked that while students seemed to be willing to take risks as creative writers, they appeared less willing to do so when approaching the task of writing non-fiction, possibly because they brought to the latter task knowledge of particular rules of essay writing that limited their willingness to experiment.

I mused that an approach they were likely to have encountered was the five-paragraph essay, that utilitarian formula for writing widely promoted as a way to express one’s opinion clearly on any matter: say what you’re going to say, say it, and say you said it.

In 1985, Donald Stewart bemoaned North America’s long-standing love affair with the form:

The five-paragraph essay is a formula, not a composition. It is rule-governed, hence easy to mark, but imposing it on every subject one writes about is the equivalent of trying to put a wiggling 100-pound dog, or a barrel of apples, or several gallons of fresh maple syrup, or the unassembled parts of a ten-speed bicycle, or three different typewriters, or a wardrobe for a Florida vacation all in the same size box. (137)

In English language arts classrooms, encouraging students to read and write a variety of non-fiction is often overlooked, and the result is that students finish their formal education with no clear understanding of how to approach non-fiction as writers or critical readers.

Reference:

Stewart, D.C. (1985). Some History Lessons for Composition Teachers. Rhetoric Review, 3 (2), 134-144.