The Will to Survive in Life of Pi, a Novel by Yann Martel

The novel Life of Pi is about a young boy’s incredible will to survive even though life throws him into a seemingly non-survivable situation. Pi grows up in India, where his parents are Zookeepers of the Pondicherry Zoo. Pi lives a simple life and has a close relationship with religion. He has faith in Hindi, Christianity, and Islam. His Hinduism keeps him and his family in a vegetarian type of culture. Pi’s father realizes that India is in political turmoil and that they would be better off moving to Canada to start a new life there, and that they will have to move.

Pi doesn’t like this idea, but has no choice but to leave and go to Canada with his parents. They move all their belongings and Animals on a Japanese owned ship known as the Tsimtsum. One night there is a horrible storm that very quickly sinks the ship. All of the animals and people are panicking; Pi was outside watching this horrible storm when the boat began to sink.

He tries to find his family but their compartment of the ship was already completely filled with vicious sea water. He then runs outside to find the life boat. As Pi hops aboard, the life boat breaks from the sinking ship and hits the open sea water.

Pi is then stranded at sea with this small life boat, which contains a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a later surprise the tiger, Richard Parker. This is where Pi’s severe struggle to survive begins.

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As time goes on, and Pi’s realization of the horrible situation he is in becomes more and more unbelievably real. The animals get hungry and the Hyena begins to eat the wounded Zebra alive. The harshly wounded zebra tries to stay alive, but then the peaceful orangutan, Orange Juice, sees the hyena killing the Zebra, and she begins to try to kill the Hyena. The animals fight very fearlessly, but the Hyena wins out. After all this Richard Parker kills the Hyena. The animals struggle to survive is one of the many ways that Martel shows us how the will to survive can bring out the strangest of forms of all of us, even the animals. Pi realizes that he will have to give up his vegetarianism and begin to eat the sea creatures to survive, and that he will also have to kill fish for Richard Parker. Pi’s creatively builds a separate boat away from the Tiger, and then tries to tame Richard Parker, his will power and spirit is truly extraordinary. Pi, almost on the brink of starvation, does eventually make it back to land with Richard Parker and the story does have a happy ending.

Martel makes it very clear in this novel just how far living creatures will go to survive in extreme suffering and danger, how will power is an almost unstoppable force, and probably the most amazing aspect of living creatures. Martel lets the reader see what acts are heroic and barbaric in a survival situation. Orange Juice’s attempt to save the zebra was Heroic, but the hyena’s treason towards the Zebra was barbaric. Pi’s lifelong vegetarianism ended by the will to not starve to death, his undying will to tame Richard Parker, just about everything Pi does throughout the book shows the reader an act of amazing will power and spirit. In the end of the book when the reader finds out that Pi’s story was a characterization of himself and other passengers, the reader is left wondering about what was just and unjust aspects of the human spirit to survive. The willpower of survival is one of the most amazing aspects of the human spirit and amazes people every day, whether it’s Pi’s situation or a fireman saving a girl from a fire. Each is amazing in and of itself.