Many people have read Life of Pi, and are familiar with the main character, Pi Patel. Although, how many of you have actually tried to observe tiny details of his life in order to understand why he is the way he is? Well, in this paper, we plan to do just that, to grasp more of an understanding of his mentality. Pi has had a very abnormal life, and that can cause him to be very different mentally and have different daily habits than most people. So, with all of that in mind, let’s go on this journey of Pi’s strange mental state. Why don’t we start in Pi’s childhood, where it all began?
Pi grew up in a small town in India. He grew up in the zoo environment, with his dad being the ZooKeeper. So, that very clearly affected him and his upbringing. For example, whenever Pi and his brother Ravi were pretty young, his dad decided to teach them a life lesson using the animals in the zoo. His dad showed how vicious the animals can be by using a goat and putting it in the habitat with the tiger to show their instincts whenever someone invades their space. He planted a goat into the tiger exhibit and it very quickly reached down, snatched it up, and ate it.
His dad said after, which you can find on page forty two of the story, “Tigers are VERY dangerous, I want you to understand that you are never, under any circumstances, to touch a tiger, to pet a tiger, to put your hands through the bar of the cages, or even get close to a cage. ” Without that example, Pi and his brother may not have been able to learn that lesson. Our next example from his childhood is that Pi was always a very open-minded child, and he was always very optimistic and excited (Sparknotes. com). This could have affected how Pi stayed alive and his will to live.
Without that kind of optimism, his life could have ended long before he would have ever seen shore. Before Pi was stranded on the lifeboat he had been a vegetarian, as he talked about in chapter 61, but with the circumstances he was under he had life and death decisions to make meaning, either eat the meat or die from hunger, and that could have affected him a lot emotionally (Book). Pi believed in 3 religions, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, and that plays into being open minded and probably affected how he lasted so long with believing he could make it and having faith in his gods.
A lot of what happened in his childhood could have played a big role in decisions he made later on while on the lifeboat. There is also a lot that he does while on the lifeboat that could affect how he acts and that could be a big part of his psychological state of mind. While he was in the lifeboat, he used praying for a couple of things. He used it to pass the time, but it also was used by him to keep his faith restored, and help him get through this really rough time in his life. He often prayed whenever something would go wrong, but at the same time he would just pray to pass some time, and talk to god.
The last thing that occurred on the lifeboat that could have affected his mindset is his realization that his family was really gone. He started to understand this heart-wrenching fact in chapter 49, when he starts to decide to look through the rations of the lifeboat. His realization that they are dead causes him to have a decrease in hope of being found and he kicks into survival mode and doesn’t focus on being found but just staying alive. Pi was on the lifeboat for a very long time. 227 days to be exact. In that amount of time, many people tend to lose their sense of communication with others.
It is typically highly unlikely that people can just come back into the normal world. However, when Pi returned, he was fully functioning, and was able to come back and do interviews, and later have a wife, children, and pets. That is pretty amazing when you think about it. Lastly, Pi is seen as the protagonist in the entire duration of the story That can prove that he had great determination and will to live because he came out a hero. He did a lot of really great things whilst on the lifeboat, and I think he is pretty admirable. So, in conclusion, Pi’s overall state of mind was very unusual for the situation he was placed in.
He was always optimistic, he had a great will to live, and he was never the type to give up. He was open minded, easy to communicate with, and adapted to his surroundings very quickly. It was pretty unbelievable that he was able to keep that amount of humor throughout his tough time on the boat and his childhood in general. That is also a piece of evidence backing up the fact that he was always able to see the bright side of things and bad situations. Pi Patel was entirely an amazing person, and he had a one of a kind personality.
