LIFE OF PI OR A SURVIVOR’S DILEMMA - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue RABINDRA BHARATI JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Année : 2023

LIFE OF PI OR A SURVIVOR’S DILEMMA

Résumé

In his multi-layered novel Life of Pi (2001), Yann Martel knits a fictional tale of dying and disappearing in the middle of the ocean. In the Pacific Ocean the protagonist Piscine Molitor Patel loses his family and the animals that his family had reared at the zoo owned by them in Pondicherry, India. The shipwreck takes place in the course of their journey from India to Canada where they are moving to take refuge from the political volatility back home. The premises that death is almost a certainty in this perilous journey through sea is aggravated by the fact that these deaths remain unrecognized, without any tomb or rituals. Human and animal corps lie in the ocean bed obliterating thereby any distinction; reducing human bodies to a state of animality, anonymization. Dying away from ones homeland, and in the middle of nowhere in an ocean deprives these deaths of any tombstone or memorial. Primo Lévi had used this allegory of a shipwreck in his memoire The Drowned and the Saved (1986). His drowned were the dead in death camps and saved were people like Piscine who believed in survival for narrating their stories, which may or may not replace a memorial: a literary gravestone? Life of Pi can thereby be read as that allegorical memorial inspired from Lévi’s work or Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975). These work attempt to fight the demolition of the memory of these dead and simultaneously make the reader conscience of the struggle that a migrant undergoes while mourning the dead or while dying. I will foreground the role of a literary fiction in underlining the despair and trauma associated to the loss appearing in the form of dead bodies in the middle of nowhere that becomes a tangible geographical location, and will also emphasize on the representation of a bigger tragedy, which is also a common denominator between death camps and Martel’s deadly ocean: a survivor’s expression of pathos in mourning the dead and concurrently overlooking them in order to concentrate on the survival in real-time and henceforth resulting in the death of self as Piscine would not emerge as the same person that he was before the start of this ordeal, pointing thereby to the bigger question: are there indeed any survivors in a forced migration process?
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Article Pi and survivor's dilemma- HAL.pdf (270.38 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)

Dates et versions

hal-04074992 , version 1 (26-05-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04074992 , version 1

Citer

Ravinder Singh Rana. LIFE OF PI OR A SURVIVOR’S DILEMMA. RABINDRA BHARATI JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, 2023, RABINDRA BHARATI JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, XXIV (09), https://rbu.ac.in/home/page/106. ⟨hal-04074992⟩
48 Consultations
58 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More