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Yann Martel's Struggles In Life Of Pi

Decent Essays

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” Certainly, the Life of Pi novel by Yann Martel describes the fears, religious struggles, and most importantly, growth of Pi Patel in one such year of struggle, as noted by Sigmund Freud. In Life of Pi, a boy tells two accounts of his isolation at sea on a lifeboat. In one of his versions of the story, Pi is on the lifeboat with a zebra, hyena, orangutan, and a tiger. In the other version, he is trapped with his mother, the cook of the ship that sunk, and a sailor on the ship who died on the lifeboat and was eaten by the cook. During both accounts, Pi struggles with his views on God and morality, as well as his fears, which he learns to overcome as his experiences …show more content…

In Pi’s story with the animals, there was a time that he needed to kill a fish to survive. Although killing a sentient being was appalling and contradictory to Pi’s moral standards (Martel, 183), he realized that if he didn’t kill it, he would die. He knew that in order to survive, he needed to suppress part of his superego and let a small part of his id out. He knew it was a necessary evil, and matured by learning to understand how to properly control his good and evil sides. Pi must also keep hold of his evil side too in his second account. The cook decided to kill the sailor and cannibalize him to survive. Pi and his mother knew that however hungry they became, they could not eat even the smallest part of the sailor (Martel, 308). To make up for this lost energy, however, they had to accept eating raw fish and raw turtle, despite their disgust. Pi knew that it would be a horrible atrocity to eat the sailor out of animal impulse, even if he was starving; however, he knew that he had to kill and eat something to survive, whether killing was wrong or not. Pi decided that the best balance of this was to eat fish. His maturing character balanced out these good and evil aspects of himself to express his ego, his proper expression of the id and

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