Life Of Pi Rhetorical Analysis
Life of Pi is intended, so Martel tells us, to make the reader believe in God. This bold, apparently evangelical, premise locates it on a dangerous moral high ground. D.H. Lawrence warned against using the novel as a forum for the author to assert his own moral or religious belief:
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality. (D.H. Lawrence, "Morality and the Novel")
Aesthetically, the fiction which reveals a truth by explicit sermonising rather than as a natural conclusion drawn from the relationships and events it presents, is displeasing, even "immoral." Indeed, Martel's statement is likely to have …show more content…
He reawakens the central power of the story as yarn and legend, as the entertaining narrative told round the camp fire and handed between generations, designed to pass the night hours with captivating drama rather than to deliver political analyses on contemporary society. Life of Pi's printed words have the loud echoes of orality as the text is framed by acts of speech, hearing and translation. In the initial pages, Martel assumes an italicised guise, focusing on the fact that the narrative to follow is one he has heard coincidentally, not deliberately created. He is the eventual author of a story which is not his own but which belongs to Pi, its primary teller; Martel's task is one of translation, not creation, interpretation or even alteration. Likewise, at the close, the child Pi relates his narrative again to two foreign interviewers, who record his words - and their own naive, uncomprehending interpretation of them - on a dictaphone with vicious electronic permanence. The text we read is a solid record of a story which is, in its vocal form, endlessly fluid, subject to change and amendments to increase its interest for a captivated audience. In normal circumstances such self-consciousness about the literary act might challenge the reader, …show more content…
The castaway narrative exposes man in his most basic state as the descendant of monkeys, concerned with existence rather than production, his superiority one of intellect rather than technology. Computers, cars, household appliances detach us from our organic existence, making us seem closer to machines than mammals on the evolutionary scale. The castaway loses all such objects. He may create new ones, but in the process we are reminded that it is the thought processes which come first, and their speed and complexity which marks us out from animals, not the tools we use and which are the by-products and physical evidence of that psychology. In Robinson Crusoe, just as Crusoe seems to have built and adapted to his new environment there is an earthquake. His house collapses- his technology fails - but in the process his belief in God (surely one of the most complex, because so abstract, of all thoughts) is awakened. Likewise as Pi's boat rusts, his clothes decay, his survival rations run out, Pi becomes increasingly sensitive to the natural embodied in the tiger, more alert to his own mental state, more aware of what fundamentally distinguishes human and not beast. The castaway's narrative, whilst thoroughly exciting for the comparative heroism of its central character -
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality. (D.H. Lawrence, "Morality and the Novel")
Aesthetically, the fiction which reveals a truth by explicit sermonising rather than as a natural conclusion drawn from the relationships and events it presents, is displeasing, even "immoral." Indeed, Martel's statement is likely to have …show more content…
He reawakens the central power of the story as yarn and legend, as the entertaining narrative told round the camp fire and handed between generations, designed to pass the night hours with captivating drama rather than to deliver political analyses on contemporary society. Life of Pi's printed words have the loud echoes of orality as the text is framed by acts of speech, hearing and translation. In the initial pages, Martel assumes an italicised guise, focusing on the fact that the narrative to follow is one he has heard coincidentally, not deliberately created. He is the eventual author of a story which is not his own but which belongs to Pi, its primary teller; Martel's task is one of translation, not creation, interpretation or even alteration. Likewise, at the close, the child Pi relates his narrative again to two foreign interviewers, who record his words - and their own naive, uncomprehending interpretation of them - on a dictaphone with vicious electronic permanence. The text we read is a solid record of a story which is, in its vocal form, endlessly fluid, subject to change and amendments to increase its interest for a captivated audience. In normal circumstances such self-consciousness about the literary act might challenge the reader, …show more content…
The castaway narrative exposes man in his most basic state as the descendant of monkeys, concerned with existence rather than production, his superiority one of intellect rather than technology. Computers, cars, household appliances detach us from our organic existence, making us seem closer to machines than mammals on the evolutionary scale. The castaway loses all such objects. He may create new ones, but in the process we are reminded that it is the thought processes which come first, and their speed and complexity which marks us out from animals, not the tools we use and which are the by-products and physical evidence of that psychology. In Robinson Crusoe, just as Crusoe seems to have built and adapted to his new environment there is an earthquake. His house collapses- his technology fails - but in the process his belief in God (surely one of the most complex, because so abstract, of all thoughts) is awakened. Likewise as Pi's boat rusts, his clothes decay, his survival rations run out, Pi becomes increasingly sensitive to the natural embodied in the tiger, more alert to his own mental state, more aware of what fundamentally distinguishes human and not beast. The castaway's narrative, whilst thoroughly exciting for the comparative heroism of its central character -