Life of Pi: Final Essay

          In Life of Pi, the main character Piscine Patel’s life takes an unexpected turn for the worse: Pi’s pious, stable life as a zoo keeper’s son in India abruptly ends when his family decides to migrate to Canada and escape escalating political instability in India. Pi, his family, and a few of their animals board a ship headed to their new life, but tragedy strikes when the ship sinks. Pi is faced with an unimaginably difficult situation; his religious beliefs are put to the test when he is faced with life or death situations, and, to a reader, Pi’s sanity appears to be dwindling and overtaken by madness. However, just as Emily Dickinson stated, sometimes madness is simply the barest, most instinctive form of human sanity.

          Pi ends up on a life boat with a few of the animals, but soon all of the animals except the tiger, named Richard Parker, die. Pi knows he must find bait to fish with to get food for Richard Parker and himself; the problem is that Pi’s devout religious beliefs, especially his Hindu faith, have discouraged him from killing or eating animals for his entire life. To survive, he must do both. He starts by killing the flying fish that surround the life boat for bait, and states that, “A lifetime of peaceful vegetarianism stood between (him) and the willful beheading of a fish”(page 175), to convey his unease regarding the situation at hand. However, Pi “knew it had to be done”.

          Pi “wept” after killing his first fish, but then he states that “after that it was easier”. This marks his transition into what some may call madness. Pi thanks a Hindu God for giving him a fish to kill, which is completely contradictory to his prior beliefs. He states that killing the Dorado “was no problem”, and he even beat the fish to death (page 177). However, Pi does not ignore this evolved mindset of his. He states in a side note that “a person can get used to anything”. Pi’s quick transition from an earnest, faithful vegetarian to a brutal, apathetic animal killer is certainly one that appears to be caused by pure madness, but in actuality, it is caused by his sheer will to survive. Pi has to become “mad” to some extent because it is the only way he can force himself to kill the animals he loves and save himself.

          After getting over his initial, religion-fueled uncertainty, Pi only becomes more savage and continues to digress from his previous culture. He dons himself in fish scales and kills many sea turtles and other aquatic animals not only for the meat but also for the game, and he “descended to a level of savagery he had never thought possible” (page 197). While this shows that Pi does become increasingly less mentally stable, or mad, killing for sport is one of the very few things Pi can do to stay busy. Pi spent hundreds of days at sea, and possessing a form of madness is inevitable for anyone denied human contact for that long. He kills so he will have a task instead of spending thousands of empty hours staring at the sea.

The term madness certainly has a definition that varies by the situation. Pi’s madness is not madness in the traditional sense: Pi acknowledges his absurd, mad behavior and that his actions do indeed deviate from his traditional beliefs, but he also realizes that his response is the only way he can exit the ocean alive and retain any ounce of sanity. The true meaning of madness is a major theme in Life of Pi because it marks the transition from a pure, innocent school boy to a teenager looking death in the eye, begging the readers to relate to Pi’s situation and asking them just how far they are willing to sway from their steadfast beliefs when faced with a challenging situation.