After finishing the novel Life of Pi, there is one quote from the second half of the novel that has continued to circulate in my mind. For multiple chapters, the main character Pi recognizes the fear he encounters every day while stranded at sea, and contemplates how it hinders his ability to survive. During this inner monologue, he concludes that, “if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid…you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you” (Martel, 179). Pi has realized that in order to conquer his fear he cannot continue to hide from it. He must be brave and face what he is afraid of if he wishes to survive, or else this fear will build until it is too difficult for him to overcome. This quote is so memorable to me because this is something I learned when I was struggling with social anxiety. In grade eight, I used to skip as much school as possible in order to avoid any and all situations that could possibly strike my anxiety. However, I quickly discovered that this was not a good idea. Every class that I did not attend for fear of my anxiety, I missed a chance to grasp and control it, effectively allowing it to snowball out of control. I think that Pi’s thoughts on the topic of fear are of vital importance to everybody. When one avoids their fear, they are essentially feeding the fire. One must try their best in this internal battle, as when they do nothing they are giving fear what it needs to grow stronger and take control.

As I was reading and learning about the main character Pi Patel, I could not help but connect him to my brother’s best friend Derek. For one, both of them have a strong relationship with God. During Pi’s struggles, he had felt that God had abandoned him and seriously began to doubt his faith. However, his deep belief and love for God was able to prevail, even through his extreme circumstances. Similarly, when my brother passed away, I remember how angry Derek felt at God for putting everybody through this, and how he questioned God’s existence. Nonetheless, as the shock of the situation calmed down, Derek turned to God for guidance and comfort. Both young men proved that their relationship with God was strong enough to sustain through the most tragic of times and as a result grow stronger. Another similarity I observed between Pi and Derek is rooted in the way that they dealt with the hardships they were faced with. Pi used the tiger he was stranded with to divert his mind from his family's death. When he was focused on keeping the beast alive and protecting himself from the wild animal he had decided not to kill, he was kept from thinking about the death of his loved ones. This behaviour can be mirrored through Derek when my brother passed away. Derek spent the following weeks after his death consoling and comforting everyone around him, never once doing the same for himself. He kept himself preoccupied with the emotions of others, effectively sidetracking his mind from his own thoughts and feelings. Both Pi and Derek distracted themselves as a means to deal with the tragic deaths they were faced with. Due to this, and their relationship with God, the character Pi reminds me of Derek.

An interesting event that happens in this section of the novel is when the tiger, called Richard Parker, that was stranded with Pi, departs from Pi’s life forever. When the shared lifeboat washes up on a beach in Mexico, Richard Parker immediately runs off into the jungle without a second look back. Although Richard Parker’s cold behaviour is what is to be expected from a tiger, Pi thought that he would receive some sort of reaction from the tiger after everything they had been through. As a result, Pi breaks down and weeps, showing just how important Richard Parker was to him. This reminds me of my childhood best friend and how our friendship came to an end. As anyone would expect, she meant a lot to me and had a deep impact on my life for many years, but it became apparent that this feeling was not mutual. In grade eight, she abandoned me for different friends without an explanation as to why. Both Pi and I had viewed the other individual as very important to us and had thought that they felt the same to some extent. However, we were proven wrong when the others left without any closure or goodbye, showing that they did not view us with the same importance.

The theme of survival is developed in this part of Life of Pi. Stranded in the Pacific with only a tiger for company, the main character Pi had to make a lot of difficult, but necessary, decisions to survive the way he did. This included giving up his lifelong vegetarianism and pacifism, as he had to kill and eat aquatic life in order to avoid starvation. This theme is similar to the one I read in “The 100” by Kass Morgan. In the universe of this novel, the human race had to migrate to outer space following a nuclear war on earth, but after many generations out there, they begin to run out of oxygen. If the human race is to survive, they have to find out if the earth is now habitable, and to do so, they send one hundred juvenile prisoners down to the surface. Just like how Pi had no other choice but to fish, people needed to be sent down to find another way for the human race to survive, or else everyone would die in space. Both novels demonstrate the extent to which humans will go in order to survive. Whether it is giving up fundamental parts of who one is, or sacrificing people, humans will do whatever they can when struggling for survival.

I really appreciate this part of the novel because I genuinely enjoyed how easily it fooled me. At the end of the book, it was revealed that the majority of what I had just read was simply a story Pi had conjured up to symbolize what really occurred when he was stranded at sea. Looking back at it now, everything I read about Pi’s situation and all the specific events that he goes through truly was much too absurd to be realistic. However, while I was reading I never stopped to contemplate how crazy it all was. Since the general plot revolves around such an extraordinary story of a boy alone at sea with a ferocious tiger, every specific event seemed to make sense in the context of the novel. The most amazing example is when Pi and Richard Parker wash up on an island. This island hosts fish eating algae that produce fresh water, and provides a home to one million meerkats who live in the trees. Most importantly, though, the island is carnivorous, and at night the floor of the island becomes dangerously acidic in order to digest whatever touches it. Looking at it now, this is a preposterous scenario, but when I was reading it I simply accepted it as truth. I was so invested in Pi’s story I did not realize until the end how implausible parts of it were. There is a strange kind of satisfaction in knowing that the author Yan Martel was able to skillfully lead me through this story with a blindness to logic. Overall, I really appreciate how the author was able to fool me into believing that Pi’s story with Richard Parker was the real story, when now it only makes sense that it is not.