"Life of Pi" as Postmodern Survivor Narrative
Author(s): REBECCA DUNCAN
Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , June 2008, Vol. 41, No. 2 (June
2008), pp. 167-183
Published by: University of Manitoba
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44029501
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Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal
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Although both popular and literary survivor stories have received critical attention for several decades, there has
been little systematic contemplation of survival in a postmodern context. Yann Martel's Life of Pi offers a fic-
tional articulation of a postmodern identity as it shapes and is shaped by a narrative of trauma.
Life of Pi as
Postmodern Survivor Narrative
REBECCA DUNCAN
trauma, survivor narratives invite contemplation of the aesthetics of memory, the
In trauma,constructi
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which presves shape and invite to cultural historical contemplation representation. events, natural of the These aesthetics disasters, stories, of and memory, which individual pres- the
ent the experience of an individual facing death or a trauma that severely disrupts the
sense of selfhood, serve as popular entertainment on television talk shows and in
women's magazines. The New York Times also offers its more literate readership dra-
matic personal profiles to reveal the intimacy and scope of crisis, from 9/11 to the
South Asian tsunamis to sexual abuse. A number of academic disciplines, including
literary and cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and the fine arts, have theorized
trauma and the possibility of its representation. Recently, these intellectual efforts
have begun to posit the survivor not as a traditionally centred, stable self but rather
in postmodern terms - decentred, multiple, fragmented, unfettered by a single notion
of truth.
Mosaic 41/2 0027- 1276-07/1 670 18$02.00©Mosaic
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168 Mosaic 41/2 (June 2008)
Yann Martels Life of Pi - part bildungsroman , part philosophical treatise, part fantasy - is foremost an experimental survivor narrative that participates in the emerging
discourse on trauma and postmodern culture. This fictional performance of a survivor
narrative prompts us to ask if a fragmented, over-determined participant in contem-
porary global culture may perceive and respond to trauma differently than, for
instance, a Holocaust survivor or the Victorian subjects of Freud's psychotherapy.
What kind of selfhood will these new survivors seek to restore, and in what form(s)
will that self be articulated? And how will postmodern readers and audiences respond?
Martel offers one such articulation, albeit imaginary, in Life of Pi. This survival
adventure of 15-year-old Piscine (Pi) Patel, which involves enduring against great
odds for 227 days in a 20-foot lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger, offers a glimpse at
the narrative possibilities for the postmodern survivor and the postmodern reader of
his tale. Through fictional strategies, Martel engages with, yet radically reshapes, the
survivor narrative, using metafictional and self-reflexive dimensions to suggest that a
survivor must not only survive the crisis, but also come to terms with the consequences of having survived. This second phase of survival necessarily occurs in post-
modern contexts of reception, and its story-making employs various postmodern
forms of expression. Martel shows that, whereas trauma may interrupt ones process
of being and becoming, the response to this interruption, undertaken by a postmod-
ern subject, can be something other than an attempt to restore unity and coherence
to ones selfhood or one's story.
Often have
have anchored
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recently inthethenotion
privileged
of a single,
socialstable
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identity
the notion
that theapproaches
sur- of a single, to stable reading identity survivor that narratives the sur-
vivor seeks to recover by telling - and hence reliving - the traumatic experience
(Janet Reno's reading of Moby -Dick, discussed below, is an example). Critical responses
to Holocaust literature likewise address the factual grounding of survivors' experiences and the literary means by which survivors seek to restore an ordered sense of
self. Efraim Sicher, in The Holocaust Novel actually disdains artistically experimental
accounts of Holocaust experiences. Likewise echoing the practical aim of helping survivors function productively in the world, sociologists Susan Warner and Kathryn M.
Felty define the transition from victim to survivor by the evolution of a reconstituted
and "whole" sense of selfhood (162).
A revival of interest in Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 70s led to new
theoretical connections among trauma, narrative, and the unconscious mind, many of
which continue to evolve. Recent use of the term "trauma" with reference to a psycho-
logical disorder derives from the 1980 recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder by
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Rebecca Duncan 169
the American Psychiatric Association (Leys 5). Soon thereafter, a range of cultural a
literary connections emerged. In addition to feminist scholarship on power relatio
voice, and subjectivity, theories of memory and meaning - from Victor Frankls exi
tential logotherapy to James Olneys writings on autobiography - have contribut
the study of trauma and survival. Although some psychologists, including Ruth Ley
have opposed the use of trauma discourse by those outside their discipline, the oppo
tunities for mutual benefits seem compelling, as they have since Freud first wrote
and through narrative.
One traditional paradigm that reflects multidisciplinary approaches to survivo
ship is offered by Janet Reno in her reading of Melville's Moby-Dick as survivor n
rative. Synthesizing survival scholarship through the early 1980s, Reno characteriz
the survivor and the healing process inherent in his or her story. Her paradigm, el
ments of which continue to inform subsequent theories of trauma and surviv
draws upon narratives of Holocaust and Hiroshima survivors as well as observati
of psychologists who studied or treated survivors of these events. Robert Liftons th
ories figure prominently, and so do James Olneys writings on memory and autob
ography. Although Melville scholars might object to Renos assignation of Ishmael
the sole narrator of Moby-Dicky her thorough reading of the novel serves as a startin
point for understanding the traditional approach to the survivor narrative.
Reno writes that, having transcended victimhood by will or by chance, the su
vivor feels isolated by an experience that he or she believes others cannot understa
In both the experience and the effort to recount it, the survivor confronts a chao
devoid of order, reason, and human values. He or she may experience guilt at havi
survived while others did not, a guilt that stems from the survivor's admission, ac
rate or not, that he or she participated in the chaos and is thus somewhat culpable
Finally, the survivor faces the need to mourn the dead, who for Reno include not o
those who perished in the disaster but also the "innocent untraumatized self th
'died' with those who did not survive" (30).
Responding to these conditions and perceptions, the survivor attempts recover
by narrating his or her experience. Reno identifies two models for this narrative, o
involving prophecy and one involving conversion. The model of prophecy infor
the narrative's shape, as the teller delves into memory and the past for context an
momentum to propel him through the horror that must be narrated. Melville
Ishmael, for instance, conveys a vast knowledge of whales and whaling that builds
surplus of credibility that he knows will be needed at the climax of the story. The con
version model enables the survivor to make sense of chaos by transforming the me
ing of events and, if necessary, "the remaking of one's relationship to the enti
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170 Mosaic 41/2 (June 2008)
cosmos" (Reno 84). The survivor must "assert authority over death" and, more broadly,
optimism over pessimism. Thus the cetological digressions, particularly their sequence
from dismembered parts of the whale's anatomy to the unified whale herd in "The
Grand Armada," serve the purpose of conversion. These digressions show IshmaePs
ability to replicate metaphorically the whale's vision - "irreconcilable images from
wideset eyes" (86) - and to impose order and unity upon such a chaotic scene. The
narrative that emerges from Reno's paradigm is marked by layering and doubling, as
the survivor merges past and present, life and death, order and chaos. Ultimately the
survivor regains a healthy perspective and a sense of wholeness that, in Reno's view,
"triumphs over senselessness" (25). James Olney provides her description of the survivor's objective: "For the realized self, life is a unitary and unifying thing, present
totally in every part of the living being" (qtd. in Reno 25). Throughout her paradigm
and her reading of Moby-Dick , her lexicon includes such terms as transcendent, meta-
physical, connectedness, and mastery.
Reno's traditional paradigm enables a partial understanding of Pi Patel's survival
narrative. Following a prophetic model, Pi contextualizes his early life in the family's
zoo, revealing an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behaviour. Thrown from the
sinking cargo ship that carries the family and its menagerie from India to Canada, the
boy draws upon this knowledge to subordinate Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger, to his
will and thus prevent the beast from devouring him. Similarly, Pi grounds his pretraumatized self in religious faith and practice, although his simultaneous adherence
to Christianity, Hindu, and Islam challenges Reno's notion of stable, unitary selfhood.
Also supporting Reno's model, Pi mourns the loss of his parents, his brother and
his "extended family - birds, beasts and reptiles" (Martel 98), a sentiment that alternates with hope that they too have survived. An early response to the disaster con-
fronts the chaos and meaningless of his new circumstances: "And am I allowed no
explanation? Am I to suffer hell without an account from heaven? In that case, what
is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? [. . .] Why can't reason give greater answers?
Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast
net if there's so little fish to catch?" (98).
The model of conversion also functions to some degree in Pi's narrative. Fed by
religious and zoological detail, Pi assigns symbolic significance to his physical and
emotional states. At a pivotal point in the boy's emerging effort to overcome despair,
for instance, he begins to feel like "Markandeya, who fell out of Vishnu's mouth while
Vishnu was sleeping and so beheld the entire universe, everything that there is" (177).
Pi then observes, "my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering
for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still." While lending this significance
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Rebecca Duncan 171
to the experience, Pi also returns from the brink of despair and moves, if not t
Reno's sense of optimism, at least toward a will to live. He discards any hope of
rescued and observes, "Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a casta
worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little. Survival starts by paying
tion to what is close at hand and immediate" (169). Once he settles into a rout
fishing, distilling rainwater, praying, maintaining the lifeboat and keeping Ric
Parker fed and passive, Pi relishes occasional moments of spiritual peace and ap
ciation for being alive.
While establishing Life of Pi as a survivor narrative, Reno's paradigm fai
account for the novel's playful excess and narrative resistance to realism or trad
diachrony. Pi is a postmodern subject, overdetermined in religious faith and vo
tarily decentred from any cultural or philosophical logos. The story he tells, laye
generic montage, becomes, at one point, an absurd transaction/commodity, simi
survival tales dramatized on television talk shows. Its manic sense of parody,
glimpsed through an existential lens, provides not only popular book club enter
ment but also a serious interrogation of the state of the survivor narrative and
dynamics of memory in a postmodern world.
Yet a transdisciplinary discourse is beginning to contemplate relations
between the kind of postmodern selfhood expressed by Pi and responses to trau
Reworkings of Freud, particularly those of Nicola King and Wendy Hesford, ar
late cultural theories of trauma that acknowledge the decentred subject-as-cons
E. Ann Kaplan examines the cultural dynamics of trauma and its representations
ing that "it is difficult to separate individual and collective trauma" (1). The rep
tation of trauma through film and performance has drawn upon postmod
aesthetics of the visual, the use of public space, and the politics of silence
Saltzman and Eric Gray-Rosendale discuss a range of such articulations in Tr
and Visuality in Modernity. Dominick LaCapra theorizes trauma at the crossroa
history and psychoanalysis, while Richard Kearney explores the aesthetics of rec
ing memory. Psychotherapists Del Loewenthal and Robert Snell have introduced
ments of postmodern philosophy to therapists and encouraged further inquiry
its uses in clinical contexts. Together, the work of these scholars suggests new
bilities for shaping - and reading - survivor narratives.
A postmodern approach to survivor literature also owes a significant de
feminist studies in the areas of subjectivity and autobiography. Sidonie Smit
Julia Watson have led and chronicled this wide-ranging effort to contest Fr
notions of a feminine selfhood posited as subordinate to the masculine. Women's
ratives of trauma serve as boundary cases in explorations of the subject's flexib
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172 Mosaic 41/2 (June 2008)
boundaries, politics of the body, and power relations, both personal and broadly cultural. In addition, Leigh Gilmore has written of the therapeutic effects of the play of
genre in survivor discourse, and Hesford has explored trauma s capacity to destabilize
notions of the "real" (Hesford and Kozol).1
In portraying Pi as a postmodern subject, I lean towards the playful and optimistic
connotations of the term, rather than the "shallow deconstructionist games" and "postmodern negativity and neglect of basic fictional functions" observed by Werner Wolf in
his effort to cast Pi as a "post-Postmodernist" (120). Wolf's morose view of postmodernism and deconstruction prompt him to locate thematic unity and connection with
"essential 'master-narratives' of humanity" (118), both based upon Pi's evolving notions
of love. Wolf's is a strong reading of the novel, his condemnation of contemporary the-
ory notwithstanding. My notion of postmodern selfhood favours optimism, resiliency,
and adaptation in a world characterized by relativism and consumer culture.
The novel's narrative structure, specifically its multi-layered focalization and its
plot sequencing, further positions it as postmodern. In addition to Pi's account, the
novel includes the comments of an "author" and transcripts of interviews with the
shipping agents sent to investigate the ship's sinking. The italicized "author" comments relate his meeting of Piscine Molitar Patel as a middle-aged Canadian biologist
and then intervene sporadically to describe Patel's appearance, his home and family,
and his demeanour. Before the narration of the sea adventure begins, the "author"
jumps sequence to assure the reader that "this story has a happy ending" (93).
The novel includes other discourses as well. Speaking to the "author," Pi occasionally quotes from a diary that he kept until his pen ran dry. The narrative also con-
tains lists of supplies, instructions for gaining mastery over a tiger, an alternate plan
for the beast's demise, a daily schedule, and excerpts from a survival manual purportedly written by a member of the British Royal Navy. The "author" also mentions yel-
lowed newspaper accounts "that made [Pi] briefly, obscurely, famous" (xi). Merging
these voices and documents is an arranging presence that fuses the various narrative
levels with metaphor, allusion, and symbol. This presence employs conversion strategies that occur beyond Pi's control: naming the ship Tsintsum , Hindu for the opening
of the void into which the earth was then created and naming the tiger after a cabin
boy cannibalized in an actual 1870 shipwreck survival. In a high modernist sense, this
arranging presence creates the illusion of unity in the novel's structure and of a recov-
ered wholeness in Pi's self-described "shattered self" (3). Yet various postmodern
strategies of layering, hyperbole, and self- reflexivity lay bare this illusion.
Finally, the novel disrupts a logical chronology of events with a 90-odd page prequel
to the sea and rescue story. It is here that Pi establishes his postmodern subjectivity
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Rebecca Duncan 173
through digressions on Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and atheism, his you
experiences layered with what appear to be adult insights. The prequel also con
alizes Pis attitudes toward animal life, including notions of captivity, inter-
compatibility, and habit. In contrast, Elie Wiesel offers, in Night , a clean, 1
exposition that sketches a few historical events, outlines Eliaser's religious devo
and characterizes forebodingly the strength and public profile of the boy's f
While the remainder of Night unravels the religious faith and witnesses the hu
tion and weakening of the father, the early sections of Life of Pi have a more co
and perplexing relationship to the sea adventure.
We recognize in these overlapping and anti-diachronic structures a postmod
affront to historical authenticity and absolute truth that subverts the "author's
allel efforts to document his writing process and acknowledge his sources. W
invited, however, to suspend disbelief when the "author" calls fiction "the sele
transforming of reality, the twisting of it to bring out its essence" (Martel
Similarly, Pi suggests to the shipping agents that telling stories and "just lookin
this world" are, unlike the "dry, yeastless factuality" the agents wish to extract, a
invention (302). These self- reflexive observations cast doubt upon narrativ
means of conveying the substance of trauma, yet they occupy brief instants in an
erwise kinetic, engaging (if not believable) tale. Not even Pis exhortion "I die"
with his pen halts his discourse for long.
Rather trauma narrative
than narrative
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andofstrategies
narratingfordynamics trauma, of memory scholars and of strategies survival and for
shaping remembered events into a narrative. Consistent among approaches to survivor narratives - traditional and postmodern - is the notion of a double structure
through which a survivor articulates past and present versions of the self and the trau-
matic experience. This doubling contributes to the shape of the narrative, especially
its sense of temporality, its choice of contexts, and its construction of the subject. The
act of interpretation in Freudian psychoanalysis, for instance, is a form of doubling
that guides memory and story onto a specific path. And Reno writes of doubling in
the survivor's loss of his "pre-traumatized self" and specifically in Ishmael's deployment of facts about whales to make sense of his experience. Lawrence J. Langer draws
from concentration camp experiences the impossibility of enacting a doubled self
that might free the imagination from the daily horrors the occupants faced. He
observes varied results in survivors' struggles to confront the suffering self in deep
memory and the recovering self in common memory (6).
In a gesture beyond a binary notion of doubling, Langer writes of an "impromptu
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174 Mosaic 41/2 (June 2008)
self" that occupies small and multiple scenes and temporalities as a survival strategy.
For Richard Kearney, the doubling involves the competing impulses to recreate the past
aesthetically (through story) with the "involuntary recall of the 'suffering of being "
(21), each of which is further burdened by the need to be believed and to reconnect with
others. Focusing more on process than outcome, Nicola King extends Langer's binary
process into a postmodern multiplicity by reworking Freud s notion of Nachträglichkeit
(also called afterwardness). King's writings on Nachträglichkeit inform my reading of Pi's
lengthy prequel to his sea adventure, while Kearney's writings help to frame useful ques-
tions about audience and the healing aspects of reconnecting with others. A balance of
empathy and detachment, as suggested by Kearney, allows us to witness Pi's ongoing
and recursive process of merging the trauma with past and present selves.
Examining Freud's notion of Nachtraglichkeity King suggests that survivors
revisit traumatic memories continuously throughout their lives, remembering details
and "discovering" new images and events that have not been available earlier at any
perceptual level. She suggests that a survivor's continuing experiences, as well as new
levels of awareness, can prompt such discoveries and lend new significance to the
trauma. King cites Freud's case of Emma, whose fear of going into shops alone
stemmed not from a taunting she received at age 12, as she long believed, but from a
mentally "unregistered" incident of sexual abuse that occurred in a shop when she was
eight. For King, Nachträglichkeit allows for multiple chronologies of memory and rec-
ognizes agency on the part of the survivor. As a tool for interpreting the structure of
memory, it provides an alternative to the view that the mind retains fixed, temporally
sequenced layers that can be excavated by a therapist or the subject for analysis and
possible revision. King's description of Nachträglichkeit supports my postmodern
view of a multiple and decentred selfhood.
There is also a narrative dimension to Nachträglichkeit. Chronicling one's life in
the wake of trauma entails providing exposition and context for the story of the traumatic event. One challenge for all life writing is to remain faithful to stages of aware-
ness and insight while providing this context. Although childhood incidents help to
characterize the survivor and establish important themes (as in Wiesel's narrator's
religious upbringing and the strength of the boy's father), narrative credibility can be
lost when these experiences seem to be enhanced by prodigious insights or hyperbolized through a pretense of naiveté. Pi Patel negotiates these perils well in the con-
textualizing portion of his first person account, in which youthful experiences are
self-consciously layered with adult insight. Beyond lending credibility in a traditional
sense, Pi's narrative strategies illustrate the potential of the concept of Nachträglichkeit
to investigate the fluid identity and perceptions of the postmodern survivor.
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Rebecca Duncan 175
These strategies are seen in action when the young adolescent Pi discusses r
gion with his atheistic biology teacher, Mr. Kumar. Visiting the zoo, Mr. Kumar
pares Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to a rhinoceros. Pi reveals the limits of his
by musing that he knows little about politics and that Mrs. Gandhi "lived far a
the north, not at the zoo and not in Pondicherry." His spoken reply that "religi
save us" plunges him even further beyond his intellectual reach. Mr. Kumar adm
atheism and calls religion "darkness." Pi wonders if the teacher is posing a trick
tion as he might in the classroom, as he has said, for instance, '"Mammals lay eg
see if someone would correct him." Mr. Kumar elaborates: "'A clear intellect
attention to detail and a little scientific knowledge will expose religion as supers
bosh. God does not exisť" (27).
Recalling this encounter in an interview with the "author," the adult Pi then w
ders, "Did he say that? Or am I remembering the lines of later atheists? At any ra
was something of the sort. I had never heard such words" (27). This temporal b
provides an obvious layering, or Nachträglichkeit , placed carefully beside the o
experience, not imposed upon it.
As this scene closes, the adult Pi adds new layers of insight, noting Mr. Ku
influence on his choice to study zoology at the university. The mature Pi calls t
logue "my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith
every word they speak speaks of faith" (28). The emphasis on impressions ("my
clue") followed by an adult-level digression on atheists and agnostics, shows
has thought and rethought the encounter over time, most likely through the f
his later shipwreck experience. In the process, he maintains a postmodern mul
ity of selfhood that foregrounds the emergence of new understandings over ti
In keeping with a story that the "author's" source promised to "make you b
in God" (x), Pi's contextualizing monologue is most elaborate in its treatment o
gious faith. True to his postmodern subjectivity and again illustrating Nachträglich
Pi narrates the evolution of his multiple religious faiths in a self-consciously l
form. His encounter with a Catholic priest is marked by the typical "disbeli
annoyance" of the 14-year-old boy. With fear and wonder, Pi explores the fortr
rectory of a Catholic church while his family vacations in Munnar. Childlike, h
spies on the priest on duty. Already committed to Hinduism, Pi studies the figu
a stained glass window and wonders which - among angels, birds and humans god and reels at the "torture scene" depicting Christ's death. He compares this
fact of Christianity to the absurdity of sacrificing himself for the misbehaviour
father's zoo animals (53). As postmodern subject, Pi decries this story, first for
the only important narrative of the faith and second for featuring a hero who di
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176 Mosaic 41/2 (June 2008 )
Granted, some of the rhetorical flourishes of this episode surpass the capacity of
a 14-year-old. Yet the sentiments expressed are authentic; Pi responds with a typically
adolescent demand for immortal heroes and a tendency to argue with authority figures. The schoolboy in him deplores "this Sons deportment," citing Christ's abuse of
a fig tree as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Vishnu and Rama, in con-
trast, present "God as God should be. With shine and power and might. Such as can
rescue and save and put down evil." Pi wonders about a Christ "who goes hungry, who
suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and
harassed, who has to put up with followers who don't get it, and opponents who don t
respect Him - what kind of a god is that?" (55).
This episode concludes with a layering of later insight imposed upon the young Pi's
hasty return to the church to profess his faith. "It strikes me now as a typically Christian
scene. Christianity is a religion in a rush," the adult Pi remarks to the "author." In contrast to the centuries-old traditions of Hinduism, Pi reflects, "Christianity bustles like
Toronto at rush hour" (57). With the use of the term "now," Pi is once again careful to
reveal the stratifications that separate his young and adult minds.
In this section, Pi also relates his religious development through a wealth of sensory details. Cathy Caruth writes of the impact of the visual on trauma survivors and
the use of visual forms to render their stories. Others have noted Walter Benjamin's
writings on visual memory as a precursor to - sometimes a post-traumatic substitute
for - linguistic expression. For the young, pre-traumatic Pi, this idea extends to all of
the senses. The boy's first encounter with Hinduism, for instance, occurs when he is
an infant, yet the adult Pi notes that "some smell of incense, some play of light and
shadow, some flame, some burst of colours, something of the sultriness and mystery
of the place must have stayed with me. A germ of religious exaltation, no bigger than
a mustard seed, was sown in me and left to germinate. It has never stopped growing
since that day" (47). Also pre-linguistic and sensory, Pi's introduction to Islam begins
with a taste of a Middle Eastern bread product, presumably Khubz, which he
describes as "tough and rubbery, real work for the teeth" (59). The prayer rug that he
childishly demands from his parents along with a baptismal rite provides a rich sensory experience, its soft pile and tassels making him "feel at home anywhere upon this
vast earth" (76).
Through this layering of sense, experience, and reflection, Pi narrates the process
of Nachtraglachkeit of a postmodern survivor. Clearly, he has revisited his youthful
experiences repeatedly, each time adding more complex insight while preserving the
sensory purity of the initial scene. A sketch of the adult Pi's home, furnished with
Hindu, Muslim, and Christian artifacts, testifies to the continued multiplicity of his
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Rebecca Duncan 177
religious faith, merging youthful adventure and consumption with a post-trau
sense of gratitude and grace.
While characterizing the postmodern subjectivity of Pi, this long preque
imposes certain reading expectations upon the boy's experience in the life
However, the reader who brings to the episode notions of a spiritually matu
complex Pi will surely be disappointed. The story of the ship's sinking and the 227
Pi spends attempting to stave off death - his and the tiger's - features very litt
gious or spiritual insight. Apart from occasional thanks to various gods and icon
sea adventure reads like a story of existential angst and psychic deprivation. Pi inc
prayers in his daily rituals, yet he forsakes vegetarianism and finds himself qui
to kill and eat turtles and flying fish. Existential themes of suffering and d
resound in Pi's observation that "you reach a point where you're at the bottom o
yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the l
iest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish" (217)
In what may seem to confirm Reno's conversion theory of the survivor, Pi
sionally seeks what he calls "elevated" thoughts. Ultimately, however, these efforts
to mockery and negation. For instance, Pi renames the elements of God's creatio
boat as God's ark, Richard Parker as God's cat, the sky as God's ear, and so o
despair conquers hope or faith, as "God's hat was always unraveling. God's pant
falling apart. God's cat was a constant danger. God's ark was a jail. God's wide
were slowly killing me" (209). These reflections contrast starkly with those
faith- and hope-laden prequel. These perceptual distinctions prevent Pi's later
mism from colouring the experience and reveal his efforts to keep this portion
experience and identity available among his earlier and later selves. Such a self-
scious effort to layer or segment the story and preserve its horrors serves two
tions. Like many survival stories, this one pulls the reader from a safe distanc
closer range with events and feelings that are difficult to accept as having occur
a civilized culture. Yet, while offering multiple versions of Pi and therefore a ra
choices for empathy or detachment, it also resists distortion or co-opting by an
ence or a dominant culture, an idea I explore below.
The movement from existentialist despair to savagery is a short step for Pi,
abandons his "last vestiges of humanness" (214) and "descendis] to a level of sav
[he] never imagined possible" ( 197). Most of this change stems from the desire
alive; ideals like vegetarianism must be sacrificed to that aim. Along with his su
practices, Pi's contemplations on zoology and botany gradually decline in confi
and efficacy. Granted, the boy succeeds in dominating Richard Parker, usi
knowledge of animal training and territoriality and benefiting from the good l
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178 Mosaic 41/2 (June 2008)
the tiger's seasick-prone stomach. Yet as the days pass, Pi loses the critical distance
with which he and his family once succeeded as zookeepers. He anthropomorphizes
the sharks, calling them "curmudgeonly old friends" (218). On the island of the purported man-eating mangrove trees, Richard Parker seems to discern - and avoid - the
danger more quickly than Pi does.
This zoologically-compromised version of Pi brings to mind the subject of
Langer's research, who could not produce a double conception of herself with which
to imagine an alternative to the immediate horrors of the concentration camp. Here,
notions of playful multiplicity are eclipsed by fragmentation, another postmodern
impulse that emerges through interruptions in the narrative itself. Unable to narrate,
Pi resorts to making lists of his routines and his plans for survival. He analyzes the
boat's survival manual, noting its presumption of seasoned sailors as audience. On
that bleak day when his pen runs dry, he narrates his own demise with the words "I
die." This moment - perhaps as close as Pi's story comes to metafiction - reveals a
continued urge to shape the experience through language, yet an ultimate failure to
will events to occur by narrating them.
Trauma theory and the postmodern merge again in one of this episode's most
horrific sections, when Pi engages with an other whom he identifies first as an insane
version of himself, then as Richard Parker, and then as the Tsintsums cook. The
encounter emphasizes the insufficiency of language in describing the horrific and the
unbelievable and explores visual representation absurdly through its own absence.
Earlier, I have suggested that not only the visual but all sensory responses may operate in extreme measures, either deploying intensely or shutting down completely dur-
ing a traumatic experience. In this episode of human encounter and admitted
cannibalism, Pi experiences both the intensity and the shutting down, and the result-
ing account raises new issues about the relative difficulty and ease of representing
trauma through narrative.
As in his early religious experiences, the seafaring Pi shows a great capacity for
the sensory. Soon after losing his fear of death, Pi goes blind temporarily and indulges
in a conversation rich with sensory images of taste. He elaborates the tastes he would
most delight in: "stuffed eggplant poriyal and coconut yam kootu and rice idli and
curd vadai and vegetable bajji" (243). His companion speaks of feasting upon the
organs and innards of various meat sources, offending the sensibilities of the vegetar-
ian Pi. These imaginary indulgences precede a discourse on eating human flesh, cigarettes, and a rubber-soled leather boot. This discussion then contextualizes the cook's
visit to Pi's lifeboat, his death at the paws of Richard Parker, and Pi's use of his flesh
as bait and a meal of last resort. Regaining his sight, Pi is able to affirm these incidents
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Rebecca Duncan 179
in the form of the cook's "butchered, dismembered body [. . .] on the floor of t
boat" (255). However, Richard Parker has consumed the man s face, so Pi "never sa
who my brother was" (256) and the visual evidence remains incomplete. These na
rative choices seem delicately tuned to bolster Pi's credibility while lessening his c
pability - once again an attempt to balance empathy and detachment among th
audience of his tale.
The sequence of events in this episode comments not only upon the struggle of
survivors to render horrific events but upon the power of narrative to neutralize their
intensity. Unlike Langers survivor, whose perceptions halt among the intensity of
unbelievable images, Pi continues to experience the sensory in forms other than the
visual. Through articulations of taste, Pi leads his reader/listener to the ultimately
inhuman act of cannibalism. Like the flesh that "slipped into [his] mouth nearly unnoticed" (256), this act slips into a story of hunger and its fulfillment with less horror than
we might expect. It may not suffice ethically for the reader to know that Pi prays daily
for the cook's soul. The episode s shock value borders on the performative or the
absurd, with some relevance to the postmodern consumption of survival narratives.
Theorieserature
eratureandofitsandaudiences.
consumption,
Thereitsseems
audiences.
to be widespread
in There fact,
support
offerfor
seems
theanother
idea thatto be postmodern widespread support approach for to the survivor idea that littelling one's story can aid the healing process, and that numerous narrative strategies
and public venues are available for those who wish to speak out. Kearney, for instance,
argues that reconnection with a community is crucial to a survivor's recovery. For this
reason, he resists Robert Lifton's idea of the "impromptu self" and sees the survivor
"work[ing] through his or her remembered past so as to become a moral agent with
some kind of narrative selfhood and constancy, capable of healing, acting, or forgiving" (65). Linda Martin Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendale, writing of survivors of sexual abuse and violence, value the transgressive, political function of speaking out about
one's experiences. Once again raising common concerns of trauma theory and the
postmodern, Pi and his "author" illustrate the transactional nature of the survivor
story.
The novel shows that the survivor may not be able to choose his audiences or his
rhetorical contexts, and that the outcome of the story as transaction is difficult to predict or control. Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale write of the current tendency of afternoon
talk show television to commodify survivor discourse for the entertainment and edification of its audience. A survivor of sexual abuse, for instance, is asked to produce lurid
and compelling details of her experience, complete with tears. Once the survivor is
objectified as the victim of the abuse, an educated, middle class "expert" takes control
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180 Mosaic 41/2 (June 2008 )
of the discourse, parsing the nuances to reassure the audience that such events need
not mar their own lives. The result is a hegemonic co-opting of survival narratives by
a dominant culture and discourse.
Pi's discursive transaction occurs with Mr. Okamoto and Mr. Chiba, agents of the
shipping company that owned the Tsintsum. They locate Pi in a hospital in Mexico,
where they conduct a three-hour interview that they hope will explain the loss of the
ship and crew. Transcripts of this interview comprise most of the final section of the
book. With promises of cookies and candy bars, the agents elicit Pi's story and then
respond with the dismissive disbelief widely associated with survivor narratives. Mr.
Okamoto assures Pi that they have enjoyed his story but adds, "'But for the purposes
of our investigation, we would like to know what really happened'" (302). The official
discourse of shipwrecks they seek does not include tigers or meerkats but rather tech-
nical data on the vessel's operating systems.
True to his postmodern self, Pi offers another story, substituting his mother, the
cook and a cannibalized young sailor for the hyena, the zebra, and Richard Parker.
(The original story includes a hyena and a zebra devoured by Richard Parker early
on.) The shipping agents try to read this story as an allegory while admitting in
Japanese they have no idea what the story means. This version brings them no closer
to the information they seek.
Clearly frustrated by Pi's lack of cooperation, the agents take another rhetorical
tack, one that fragments the elaborate story and - by extension - Pi's sense of self.
They ask about distress signals, the fitness of the crew, the weather conditions, and the
motion of the ship, questions designed to elicit brief, factual observations. In this
manner, the agents scatter Pi's invention into a series of discrete empirical facts, closing down the possibility of a story that might create a survivor and allow him to make
meaning of his experience. Likewise, the agents' official report, the final discourse of
the novel, outlines in sparse, impersonal terms the few conclusions that Pi's testimony
produced. The report stands in contrast to the fullness of Pi's stories and once again
comments upon the ways in which the responses of others can further fragment the
postmodern self.
Like the talk show encounter studied by Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale, this transaction also shows a conflict in aims and expectations between survivors and their listeners. The shipping agents rightfully have an insurance matter to resolve, and talk
show audiences may want to be entertained - within appropriate moral bounds with taboos and transgressions while remaining safely distant from such experiences
themselves. Survivors are thus caught between the desire to reconnect and the risk of
enduring public humiliation and other psychic harm, a dilemma that, in television
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Rebecca Duncan 18i
culture, often involves the undereducated, the disenfranchised, and those lack
media savvy.
Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale advocate for alternatives to the discourses of power,
and Life of Pi enacts narrative innovation that illustrates these alternatives. Survivor
peer groups, they write, can eliminate the detached expert who interprets traumatic
experiences in hegemonic ways. In Pi's case, his fellow hospital patients treat him gen-
tly, as do the village women who find him washed up on the beach. Pi observes that
the journey from his landing to his present life becomes "one long, easy corridor" of
support and love (286). Some of these encounters occur across linguistic and cultural
barriers, and so the degree to which Pi articulates his story through language is sometimes limited. Yet over time he does reconnect, with the help of facilitators, not inter-
preters. Assisted by the discourses of zoology and religious studies, he works and
reworks his past and thus survives his survival in clearly multiple - and empowered -
postmodern ways.
The division between story and theory or story and interpretation also figures in
Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale's approach. They write that survivors can interpret their
own stories for maximum transgressive value. A number of the metanarrative comments Tve discussed so far, including the layers of perceptions gathered across time,
show Pi s eagerness to interpret his survival story. Some of his most compelling reflec-
tions occur in the interview with the shipping agents, where he points out the distinction between the story he needs to tell and the "straight facts" his listeners expect.
He asks, "'Isn't telling about something [. . .] already something of an invention?'"
When the agents fail to comprehend, he elaborates, "'The world isn't just the way it is.
It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?"' When the men try to placate Pi by complimenting his
intelligence, he decries their preference for "'a story that won't surprise you. That will
confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differ-
ently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality'"
(302). With this advocacy for narrative and its representational risk-taking, Pi begins
the survival process that has reached a more comprehensive stage in the prequel.
And so, within a few days of his rescue, Pi seems to intuit the distance that will
separate his experience from that of humanity as he articulates for all survivors the
conflicting expectations their listeners will hold and the assaults their credibility will
endure. His comments on the connections among life, fact, and story ease the burden
of credibility by opening postmodern alternatives to traditional narrative shapes and
rhetorical contexts. The inquiry that sparked this reading of the novel also prompts
me to ask if the survival stories emerging from contemporary trauma will attempt
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182 Mosaic 41/2 (June 2008)
new notions of selfhood and multiple narrative shapes, and, if so, what types of post-
modern survival they will articulate. Similarly, postmodern options promise to take
readers beyond the simple "Which version of Pi's story do you believe?" questions that
characterize the "Group Reading Guide" at the end of the trade edition. Supposing an
audience more open to the complexity of the postmodern self, we might pass over the
claim that this story "will make you believe in God" and challenge readers to contemplate whether or not they believe in Richard Parker.
NOTES
1/ While acknowledging the value of this work, I would position Life of Pi in a genealogy of survivor sto-
ries and critical discourse tracing the evolution of the solitary male survivor. My genealogy includes
Melville's Moby-Dick, Elie Wiesels Night, and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Janet Reno's reading of
Moby-Dick as survivor narrative sets forth a traditional paradigm of recovery against which to read Life of
Pi. The use of pre-traumatic context in Elie Wiesel's Night offers a point of departure, as does its genrecrossing into fiction, despite its autobiographical heft. In "Going all to Pieces: A Farewell to Arms as
Trauma Narrative," Trevor Dodman reads Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms through theories of war and
trauma, with a focus on Frederic Henry's ultimate failure to achieve wholeness through "prosthetic thinking" and multi-layered temporality, memory, and narration ( Twentieth Century Literature 3 [Fall 2006]:
249-74). These protagonists experience different relations to the systems of hegemony addressed in feminist scholarship of survivor stories. A reading of these relations departs from my focus but would be well
worth investigating. Perhaps a postmodern view of the surviving male subject can begin such a project.
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REBECCA DUNCAN is Associate Professor of English and Director of undergraduate research at
Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Genre, Postmodern Culture,
and collections on Jane Austen and contemporary short fiction. She is currently creating a digital
archive of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reviews.
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