Life of pi : a challenging postmodernist adventure

الملخص EN

Yan martel’s novel, life of pi, was published in 2001 and instantly became a smashing hit.

the novel records the marvelous journey of pi patel, an indian teenager who is stranded in the middle of the ocean with a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan and a Bengali tiger by the name of richard parker.

in his creation of such an incredible story, martel resorts to a complicated meta-fictional frame narrative that induces his readers to suspend their disbelief, in order to savour the mind’s magical ability to deal with the most odd circumstances.

this paper seeks to explore how martel’s life of pi transcends the conventional castaway story, as it urges the reader to re-vision human-animal relations away from the dominant anthropomorphic perspective.

the novel highlights the power of story telling to create a sense of the magical that challenges any conclusive perspective.

through its use of magical realism, life of pi becomes more than just an adventure story, since it addresses some of the most complex and meaningful issues.

through his inversion of the traditional animal-human relationships, martel’s life of pi has ingeniously refuted the binary divisions between animal and human, civilization and wildness, rational and mysterious.

the reader shares a partnership with the postmodernist writer in trying to figure out the meaning of the text; magic realism invites the reader to be creative like the author, and to think about issues on different planes.