Escaping the Real World

an essay response to Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

Do you ever wonder what you would do, or what would happen, if you were stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; lost and alone with nothing around you but as much water as you could imagine? Almost anything is possible. You never know what might happen. Some people may go insane or crazy. Some may start to hallucinate or dehydrate. Maybe even their body would start to eat its self because of hunger and starvation. Rarely would you stay normal and have nothing wrong happen to them. Pi has witnessed the worst that can happen when you’re alone in the middle of the pacific starving to death just trying to get along day by day. A young man about the age of 14 gets lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean after the ship he was traveling on, sinks suddenly. He gets thrown into a lifeboat with some other members. The novel Life of Pi, by Yann Martel has two stories. Being lost in the ocean, Pi makes an alter ego for himself, making this his escapism to live his life in the ocean, fake. Not having to face his fears in real life , making himself think that everything is going to be ok. There are two different stories that Pi tells, one is his alter ego and escapism and one is the real thing.

Pi starts out his journey traveling with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a massive 450 pound Bengal tiger. Fears immediately take over him when he notices who he is on his voyage with. The only thing running through his mind is that is going to be eaten sooner than later. It will happen as soon as one of the animals gets hungry enough to start eating the others. Something from the back of his mind finally comes forward and he realizes that all of the passengers on board with him are used to having boundaries, and now that they don’t, they don’t feel safe or protected any more. Now, he doesn’t know what is going to happen or what they are going to do. Pi knows that all he can do is stay out of their way and avoid them. While traveling through the water many events start to happen. Even though the animals all feel unprotected and in danger the dominant animal out of all them, which would be the tiger, starts to take control and mark his territories with the other animals. He lets them know what his area is and what they can have. That doesn’t last very long when the animals start to get hungry and have nothing to eat. First, the zebra was killed—the hyena had killed it and then started to eat it. Soon to be the orangutan and the hyena either killed by each other or by Richard Parker, the massive beast. Things went on like that until all the animals were gone—dead, and he thought he was alone to survive by himself in an ocean that fills more than half our earth.

Suddenly he noticed that they were not all gone, the tiger was still on the boat and was going to get hungry sooner or later. Pi realized this and looked the boat over and over again for food or something to help him until he came to a box filled with supplies,to help a survivor. Something in it said that he should build a raft, so he did out of other oars and life jackets. From the time that it was finished he slept on the raft and really stayed on it all the time for almost the entire trip. His life went on like this, still not knowing where to go or what to do. Although, Pi had boundaries of his own like the animals had as well. He knew where not to go or what not to do on the boat so that Richard Parker would not come after him.

Boundaries and animals in the middle of the ocean stranded from a sunken boat don’t really sound right which is why Martel made another part of this story. In the end of this novel, Pi starts to realize, once he has gotten back into reality—into the real world, that all that time he has been trapped on the boat with real people—his mom; someone who loved him so dearly and who he loved greatly with his heart. A crazy crew man; a man filled who disgusted many people, like cutting the boys leg off just for bait so that he could survive, and a poor boy who hardly had say in anything and just got lost there with them. So, what was Pi’s life really while he was on the boat with real people rather than animals? Did his imagination made up to make his fears go away from the real world? He didn’t notice until now, but he really was lost in the middle of the Pacific with some people he didn’t know and some people he did know. The tragic part about knowing he was on the boat with real people was the fact the he then knew that instead of animals dying it was the people on the boat. Something that broke his heart, like his mother’s death.

Now, the entire animal story is coming together to relate to the human story. His imagination made up the animal story to relate to what was happening in real life just not with real people. In the novel Richard Parker—the 450 pound Bengal tiger was really Pi himself and maybe his imagination really did not make this up, Pi just imagined it so he could ‘escape’ from reality, it was his escapism. He really didn’t want to admit to himself that he really did kill some of the other people on the boat because of hunger and starvation, and that he did some of the actions 2that ‘Richard Parker’ did. Everything starts to pair up with him, the people, and the animals on the boat. One of the main things that pieces everything together in this novel is that fact that when Pi and supposedly Richard Parker hit Mexico, this 450 pound Bengal tiger runs away never to be seen again. This was because this was Pi’s alter ego, another part of him that he doesn’t need anymore now that he has reached land and will get his normal life back again. He doesn’t need to pretend about who he is anything anymore, he has everything there for him now.

Pi lives a very different life while living in the Pacific but somehow he survives, now he has survived a sinking cargo ship, crazy animals or humans—still unknown, and an island that was floating, eating away everything that was on it slowly but surely. It is unbelievable how he made it all the way without starving to death, or hallucinating, or getting eaten alive, but there is a reason that he made it. His escapism—the thing that made him escape real life and believe that it wasn’t as dangerous as it really was. If he didn’t go to his own little world, and just kept it how it was, living on the boat with the humans he would have clearly gone crazy because of knowing that he was there with a crazy man and his mother. He would do so much if he really knew that he was on it with those people. He would have fought to keep his mother alive as long as possible, he would have fought to help the boy stay alive, and he would have fought to get the crazy man off the ship as soon as possibe, but he didn’t and that’s what kept him alive. We all escape something in our lives at some time or another and this one thing the he escaped just saved his life.