earticle

영어

This paper aims to regard Pi as a religious person and examine Pi’s inner mind represented in the image of a tiger in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. A 15-year old Pi battles for his survival for 227 days in a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger. Pi’s story is told by an author- narrator who encounters Francis Adirubasamy in Pondicherry, and later two Japanese investigators who do not contain any reference to God or religious matters in their report. With the unsolvable question of the story’s truth about the tiger, Pi is asked to create another story without animals, which makes the story much more complicated. During 227 days in the lifeboat, the tiger kills animals and human beings aboard except Pi, which is inexplicable. The tiger’s name, Richard Parker, serves a reminder of the shipmate who is killed by his mates because of hunger. In this sense, Parker is likely to be created as an imaginary object Pi projects with his anthropomorphic longing when he is unable to accept his savagery and animality. Regardless of his confession that he kills and eats his mate’s flesh, Pi says he can survive thanks to his relation to the divine, which is the religious mechanism to enable him to endure his suffering. Therefore, Life of Pi is a narrative of not so much God as Pi’s salvation from his shattered self.