Genre: Drama, Adventure, Fantasy
Characters:
*Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) - The protagonist of the story.
*Richard Parker -The Royal Bengal tiger with whom Pi shares his lifeboat.
*Francis Adirubasamy - The elderly man who tells the author Pi’s story during a chance meeting in a Pondicherry coffee shop. He taught Pi to swim as a child and bestowed upon him his unusual moniker.
*Ravi - Pi’s older brother.
*Santosh Patel - Pi’s father. He once owned a Madras hotel, but because of his deep interest in animals decided to run the Pondicherry Zoo.
*Gita Patel - Pi’s beloved mother and protector.
*Satish Kumar - Pi’s atheistic biology teacher at Petit Séminaire, a secondary school in Pondicherry.
*Father Martin - The Catholic priest who introduces Pi to Christianity after Pi wanders into his church.
*Satish Kumar - A plain-featured Muslim mystic with the same name as Pi’s biology teacher.
*The Hindu Pandit - One of three important religious figures in the novel. Never given a name, he is outraged when Pi, who was raised Hindu, begins practicing other religions.
*The Hyena - An ugly, intensely violent animal. He controls the lifeboat before Richard Parker emerges.
*The Zebra - A beautiful male Grant’s zebra. He breaks his leg jumping into the lifeboat. The hyena torments him and eats him alive.
*Orange Juice - The maternal orangutan that floats to the lifeboat on a raft of bananas. She suffers almost humanlike bouts of loneliness and seasickness. When the hyena attacks her, she fights back valiantly but is nonetheless killed and decapitated.
*The Blind Frenchman - A fellow castaway whom Pi meets by chance in the middle of the ocean. Driven by hunger and desperation, he tries to kill and cannibalize Pi, but Richard Parker kills him first.
*The Cook - The human counterpart to the hyena in Pi’s second story. He is rude and violent and hoards food on the lifeboat. After he kills the sailor and Pi’s mother, Pi stabs him and he dies.
*The Sailor - The human counterpart to the zebra in Pi’s second story. He is young, beautiful, and exotic. He speaks only Chinese and is very sad and lonely in the lifeboat. He broke his leg jumping off the ship, and it becomes infected. The cook cuts off the leg, and the sailor dies slowly.
*Tomohiro Okamoto - An official from the Maritime Department of the Japanese Ministry of Transport, who is investigating the sinking of the Japanese Tsimtsum. Along with his assistant, Atsuro Chiba, Okamoto interviews Pi for three hours and is highly skeptical of his first account.
*Atsuro Chiba - Okamoto’s assistant. Chiba is the more naïve and trusting of the two Japanese officials, and his inexperience at conducting interviews gets on his superior’s nerves. Chiba agrees with Pi that the version of his ordeal with animals is the better than the one with people.
Setting:Pi’s boyhood home in Pondicherry, India; the Pacific Ocean; Tomatlán, Mexico; and, briefly, Toronto, Canada
Plot:A novelist has come to talk to Pi Patel, a middle-aged Indian immigrant living in Canada. Pi's parents named him Piscine Molitor after a swimming pool in France. As a child he changed his name to "Pi" because he was tired of being called "Pissing Patel". In flashback we see that his family owned a zoo, and Pi took great interest in the animals, especially a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. When Pi tries to feed the tiger, his father forces him to witness it kill a goat. Pi is raised Hindu and vegetarian, but at 12 years old, he is introduced to Christianity and then Islam, and starts to follow all three religions as he "just wants to love God."
When Pi is 16, his father decides to move the family to Canada, where he intends to settle and sell the zoo animals. They book passage on a Japanese freighter. One night there is a storm; the ship begins to founder while Pi is on deck. He tries to find his family, but a crew member throws him into a lifeboat. Pi watches helplessly as the ship sinks, killing his family and the crew. After the storm, Pi finds himself in the lifeboat with an injured zebra, and is joined by an orangutan. A spotted hyena emerges from the tarp covering half of the boat, and kills the zebra and the the orangutan. Suddenly the tiger Richard Parker emerges from under the tarp, killing the hyena.
Pi gets out biscuits, water rations, and a hand axe. He builds a small raft and stays at a safe distance from the tiger. Pi begins fishing and is able to feed the tiger. He also collects rain water for both to drink. When the tiger jumps off to hunt fish, at first Pi wants to let it drown, then he relents and helps it climb back into the boat. After many days at sea, Pi trains the tiger to accept him in the boat. He also realizes that caring for the tiger is keeping him alive. Weeks later and half dead, they reach a floating island. Both Pi and Richard Parker eat and drink freely and regain strength. But at night the island transforms into a hostile environment: the fresh water turns acidic, the resident meerkats sleep in the trees, the plants are carnivorous. Pi discovers the island's secrets when he finds a human tooth. Pi and the tiger leave.
The lifeboat eventually reaches the coast of Mexico. Pi is crushed that that the tiger does not acknowledge him before disappearing into the jungle. Pi is rescued and carried to hospital, weeping. Insurance agents for the Japanese freighter come to interview him. They do not believe his story and ask what "really" happened. He tells a less fantastic account of sharing the lifeboat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the cook. The cook kills the sailor to use him as bait. In a later struggle, Pi's mother pushes him to safety on a smaller raft, and the cook stabs her as she falls overboard. Later, Pi returns, takes the knife and kills the cook.
In the present day, the novelist notes the parallels between the two stories: the orangutan was Pi's mother, the zebra was the sailor, the hyena was the cook, and Richard Parker, the tiger, was Pi himself. Pi asks him which story the writer prefers, and the writer chooses the one with the tiger because it "is the better story", to which Pi responds, "And so it is with God". Glancing at a copy of the insurance report, the writer sees they wrote that Pi somehow survived 227 days at sea with a tiger: the insurance agents had also chosen the more fantastic story.
Theme:
The power of life’s force; the human desire for companionship; storytelling as a strategy for self-preservation.
Symbolism:
*Pi (Piscine) Patel
-Pi represents all humans,.
*the lifeboat-represents isolation
*the Ocean-represents life.
*The color orange-in Life of Pi, the color orange symbolizes hope and survival. The whistle, buoy, and tiger are orange and all help Pi survive, just as Orange Juice the orang-utan provides a measure of emotional support that helps Pi maintain hope in the face of a horrific tragedy.
*The animals in Pi’s lifeboat-symbolize human traits and may also represent people.
*The island- it represent material things,success, power which can gave us happiness but at night i will consume us and eat us, eat or morals and values as human being. The day at the island represents the benefits we can have if we have power,money,success; but at night the island represents the disadvantages of having them, which will later on eat us or poison us as a whole.
*Pi Patel and Richard Parker- Pi may represent God and Richard Parker may represent us humans, as God sacrificed a lot to save us and yet we sometimes forget about it if we gain comfort in life.
1. What does the title mean in relation to the film as a whole?
- The title gives us and idea what's the story all about. And the story is all about the life of Pi, which narrates his experience as a cast away,with the help of his faith he able to survived.
2. Among the characters, to whom can you relate to?
-For me, I can relate myself to the tiger, it represents the humans, and Pi symbolizes God. When the tiger was “saved”, it was the boy who turned his back on “God” and never “thanked” him for saving him. Humans, as we are, we have forgotten about God when life is easy but when when trouble comes, we run to Him. We don't appreciate what He had done for us.
3. Which part of the presentation struck you the most? Why?
-The last part of the movie,when Pi asked his friend which story did he prefer and the guy answered the story with the animals and Pi answered that it was a good choice, for the story goes with God. And it shows that with God everything is possible. Believing in the unbelievable.
4. What is the movie’s message?
-The movie is all about faith, that we have God who is always there for us.
5. Did I like this in general? Why?
Yes, because the movie was really inspiring, it had touched me in many ways. Few of this is my relationship with my family and with God, how important their role is in my life.
6. Did I agree with the main theme/purpose? Why or why not?
Yes, because as Pi continues his adventure,it explains that we people, need companion in order to survive. As Pi Patel said that, if Richard Parker may not be on that boat he might not able to survived.
7. What specifically did I like/dislike? Why?
What I've liked a lot is on how Pi Patel told his 2nd version of the story, on how did he came up with the representation of each characters on the 1st story. In which he didn't lied or just make up the story, still the story is true but just with different characters that portray a role.
8. Are there any aspects of theme which are left ambiguous at the end? Why?
Yes, because the ending was confusing,for there are two version of the story.
9. How does this film relate to the things that are happening in your life?
I can relate the film in my life in every way, i can consider the journey of Pi Patel through the Pacific as my life and to reach mexico or to be saved is my goals in life. And even if I'm struggling yet we always have a reason to live and to continue our journey; he was motivated by Richard Parker (tiger), which simply explains that we human needs companion in our journey, in our life. And for me, the island means to me as the success or the false happiness which may eat me up, or I may be blinded with its "sugar coating stuffs" with the benefits of the success,fame,power,money; which will soon consume me as a person. And as Pi Patel leaves that island, i can relate about it that we have a point in our lives that even we have all that we want in our hands, we still need to sacrifice, in able for us to continue our journey, to have a better life.
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