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摘 要

加拿大作家扬·马特尔的小说《少年派的奇幻漂流》，讲述了少年派和一只叫理查德·帕克的孟加拉虎在太平洋上漂流227天的奇幻历程。小说中，作者大量应用了隐喻手法来折射作者对人性与社会的思考。本文主要通过一些故事情节分析，来挖掘出书中的隐喻及其所象征的现实意义以此来理解作者的写作意图。

关键词：《少年派的奇幻漂流》；隐喻；现实意义

Contents

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………….1

1.1 Yann Martel and Life of Pi 1

1.2 The metaphor 1

2. Literature Review……………………………………………………………2

3. Metaphors in the Story and Their Realistic Meaning……………… …….3

3.1 The tiger- Richard Parker 4

3.2 The cannibal island 7

3.3 The name of Pi 8

3.4 Three Religions 9

4. Conclusion………………………………………………………………......10

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………...12

1. Introduction

1.1 Yann Martel and Life of Pi

Life of Pi is the second novel of Canadian writer Yann Martel. It won the Award of Man Brook in 2002, the German National Book Awards and other four international awards. The book had hit the best-seller list of New York Times for more than one year. That’s why seven million copies have been published all over the world since it came out. The novel tells an adventure story about Pi and a tiger named Richard Parker on the Pacific Ocean.

An author who was seeking inspiration accidentally learned the legendary of Pi. With curiosity, he visited Pi and heard a long but amazing story. Pi’s father owned a zoo. Living in such a particular environment, Pi had his own idea towards belief and nature. Pi’s parents decided to immigrate to Canada for a better life when Pi was 17. Because of the storm, their ship sank in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And the story of Pi’s 227-day journey on a lifeboat began with a tiger, Richard Parker.

Pi was the only person who survived in that shipwreck except one hyena, one zebra losing a leg, one female Congo chimpanzee and a three-year-old adult Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Each animal contained a metaphor. The writer, Yann Martel, tried to convey some meaningful teachings through these metaphors.

At a deeper level, it is a story about humanity and animality, belief and hope, life and growth. In this fantastic adventure, Yann Martel effectively used metaphors not only to express a story on adventure and survival, but also to motivate the readers to think deeply on religion, life, self recognition and other philosophical topics. The metaphors in this novel show great originality of the writer and they embody the aesthetic function and educational function. At the same time, Yann Martel revealed several philosophic teachings behind these metaphors. This thesis will sort out and summarize the metaphors in Life of Pi and probe into their real meanings to figure out what the writer really wants to tell us.

1.2 The metaphor

Studies on metaphors among western scholars could be dated back to Aristotle. In his classic works Poetics and Rhetoric, Aristotle had mentioned metaphors for many times and he gave a clear definition on the functions of rhetoric. He believed that a metaphor is kind of rhetoric which use one thing to refer to another and said “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.”（Shu Dingfang, 2000:3）Hegel defined metaphor as an abbreviation form of simile in Esthetics. The meaning of image itself was written off while the real meaning was conveyed through the context around the image, although it was not expressed specifically（Hegel, 1996:141）.

The metaphors in literature and in rhetoric are differentiated from each other as well as interrelated with each other. The former could be described as an important technique of expression while the latter underlines the value of reference in a specific language performance. Metaphors arranged in literature works are indirect and vague. Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action (Lakoff, 1980: 5). In any piece of literature work, the ideas and concepts which the author wants to express are not revealed directly, but rely on indirect descriptions. Meanwhile, the connotations of metaphors are not unfolded clearly before the readers. That means readers need to interpret in their own methods depending on their experience and literary attainments.

2. Literature Review

Life of Pi is a piece of representative works of Yann Martel. There have been a considerable number of researches about this novel. For example, Ai Shaoliang elaborated Christian culture and the power of belief in his essay “Christian Culture in Life of Pi”. He analyzed the cultural background of the author and the novel to make readers feel the power of belief behind the charming story and guide them to interpret the novel from a different perspective. Yang Kaiyu discussed cross-cultural communication in “The Appreciation of the Creation of Eastern and Western Culture in Life of Pi” which led readers to pay attention to the value of human culture. The thesis studied cross-cultural characteristics from the culture, logic and plots in the novel. What’s more, some scholars wrote essays from other different angles like the Sphinx factors in Pi, illusion and reality, character and destiny and so on.

This thesis analyzes the novel Life of Pi from another angle. More attention will be paid to the metaphors in this novel and the novel will be interpreted as a whole. Life of Pi is not only an adventure story but also a fable, because there are a number of metaphors in this novel. These metaphors represent abstruse philosophy about life, belief and rationality and could be found everywhere in this novel. Through the study of the realistic meaning behind these metaphors, people can have a clear understanding of Martel’s main ideals in this novel.

3. Metaphors in the Story and Their Realistic Meaning

Metaphors about animals could be found everywhere in this novel. The four animals- a zebra, a female Congo chimpanzee, a hyena and a tiger, constituted the main line of the first story. In the first few days during Pi’s drift on the ocean, the hyena had eaten the zebra, killed the chimpanzee, and finally died of the tiger, leaving Pi facing the tiger alone. Knowing that he could not conquer the tiger, Pi chose to deal with difficulties together with the tiger.

Then Pi fed the tiger depending on living skills written in code of survival on sea to save himself. After experiencing various kinds of hardship and challenge, Pi was finally rescued in Mexico. However, the tiger, Richard Parker, ran back to the jungle without even looking back and disappeared. If the story stopped here, it seemed to be a fantastic adventure story which happened around Pi and four animals, new but meaningless. When the second story was made known, changes appeared. The reality which seemed to be crueler was exposed to the readers. They found that there were actually no real animals on the lifeboat, just a cook, a sailor whose leg was broken, Pi and his mother. The cook killed and ate the sailor. What’s more, he killed Pi’s mother in front of Pi. Pi reached the end of his forbearance in severe embarrassment. At last, he picked up the knife to kill the cook. Further, Pi ate the body of the cook in order to survive in such a predicament. The cruel fact was not uncovered until the end. The scenes which seemed to be meaningless, but carefully arranged had become the foreshadowing elaborately planned in this novel. The story which was thought to be a fantastic adventure got sublimation. The brutal and merciless reality and the inventive metaphors were shown to the readers. Through our cognition and association, we could find that the zebra with a broken leg stood for the sailor who also had a broken leg and wore pinstripes. Moreover, when the ship was attacked by the storm, the Chinese sailor shouted “Zebra! Zebra!” in mandarin, following the jump of the zebra after Pi had jumped into the lifeboat. The hyena represented the cook because the cook reacted banteringly and outrageously when Pi’s mother asked for some vegetables which corresponded to the hyena’s image. The female Congo chimpanzee was a metaphor for Pi’s mother as Martel wrote in his book, “She came floating on an island of bananas in a halo of light, as lonely as the Virgin Mary.” (Martel, 2001: 139) The sex of the chimpanzee, the analogy of Virgin Mary and also the truth that the chimpanzee Orange Juice had two fine boys showed the relation between the chimpanzee and Pi’s mother. What’s more, the female chimpanzee was the only animal helped by Pi to get on the lifeboat.

3.1 The tiger- Richard Parker

3.1.1 A metaphor for belief

The novel describes a lot about Pi and religion. Pi got elementary education about Hinduism from his mother. When he was 12 years old, he knew about Christianity and Islam later in his life. Pi was absolutely not a devout believer, but a pantheist for the simple reason that he had three beliefs. Pi told the author who visited him that belief was just like a building with many rooms, doubt existed in every floor. It was the doubt that made the belief alive.

Pi had a strong interest in religion and he believed animals had their own souls. He reached into the iron fence in order to feed the tiger a piece of meat. Luckily, his father stopped him in time; otherwise he would lose one of his arms as a result. With the aim to educate Pi, Pi’s father fed the tiger a living sheep.

The cruel scene made Pi begin to suspect his previous knowledge on tigers. Moreover the tiger was a living creature and it was the tiger that accompanied Pi which helped Pi struggle to live. It showed the power of the tiger or the power of Pi’s belief which supported him to undergo numerous troubles and avoid mental breakdown. It implied that the tiger was the belief.

Besides, we can also find the evidence in the conversation between Pi and the priest in the church. Pi asked the priest why human sinned but God’s Son paid the price. “Love.” That was Father Martin’s answer (Martel, 2001: 67). God made the Son approachable. Pi couldn’t understand it and asked what a kind of love it was to save the sin by means of sacrificing the innocent. But Pi liked the Son, and he told himself not to let the Son leave his mind. We know that the Son refers to Jesus Christ who offered himself to the world as redemption. He was sent by God to the world in terms of a human body, so the Son could feel completely how weak and helpless human beings were when they were facing the Satan. Nobody could defeat the Satan; therefore Jesus was born in the earth and used the weakness of human body to triumph over the Satan and all the temptations. Thus Jesus led a new way to God for human beings. The drift on the ocean made Pi aware that the tiger was the desirable Son in his mind who accompanied him to bear the hardship and constantly supported him to combat with hunger, loneliness and storm.

3.1.2 A metaphor for the animal nature inside human beings

The Bengal tiger in this novel was first called “Thirsty” when it was founded by Richard Parker. However, their names had been exchanged by a mistake when the tiger was sent to the zoo. As a result, Richard Parker became the tiger’s name.

Richard Parker could be regarded as the symbol of the animal nature of human beings in this novel. Specifically, it was another Pi seceded by Pi himself(Wu Dan, 2013: 37). When Pi first met the Father in church, the Father said that he must be thirsty while Pi agreed.

The pun indicated that Richard Parker was Pi to some degree. The reason for the author using an animal as a metaphor for a person is that actually they have some characteristics in common. Tiger, regarded as the forest king, has an image of ferocity and ferity in both eastern and western culture. As senior animals, human beings couldn’t get rid of all the intrinsic characteristics of animals. Just like Engels once said the fact that human beings are originated from animals has determined that people could never get rid of the beastliness. Richard Parker, a fictitious role in this novel, not only was the embodiment of Pi, but also coexisted with Pi. That means the tiger represented the natural attributes in Pi while Pi represented the social attributes in human civilization.

When Pi’s father ran a zoo, he fed a goat to a hungry tiger in order to tell Pi that tiger was not a friend of human beings, which impressed Pi deeply. From that day on, Pi learned the law of the jungle that the weak would be regarded as an easy prey to the strong.

When the shipwreck happened, a zebra, hyena, chimpanzee and Pi had escaped to a lifeboat. It was in this lifeboat that Pi witnessed the hyena ate the wounded zebra and killed the chimpanzee. In the second story, the truth was that the cook ate the sailor and killed Pi’s mother. The law of the jungle in the human world had knocked down Pi’s moral line. His mother’s death had irritated him thoroughly. Mixed with three religions, he shouted, “Come on! Come on!” At the same time, Richard Parker jumped up and killed the hyena as Pi killed the immoral cook in the second story. It is obvious that Richard Parker referred to the burst out of the suppressed animal nature in human beings in civil society.

3.1.3 A metaphor for the evil of human beings

The needs for survival and society made people pace up and down between good and evil. The brutal French cook was the extreme representative of the evil of humanity. When Pi killed the French cook just as the tiger killed the hyena and revenged for his mother, he broke the moral bottom line. The tiger which jumped out could be seen as the incarnation of evil. When the evil in Pi was out of control, the feeling of guilty urged Pi to fight with the evil inside of him. However, faced with the ordeal for survival, Pi had to give up his vegetarian diet and fed on the body remained. When people are in extremely difficult environment, no matter how kind-hearted they are, they will be ferocious. But people will hide their evil when their security has been assured. Pi got married and had a pair of children after he was saved which seemed to be a perfect ending. It showed that Pi had walked out of the guilty and rebuilt his spiritual beliefs to lead a normal life.

Pi believed in Islam, Hinduism and Christianity, but Pi prayed in Islamic way before dinner. This is because Allah forgives Adam and Eve while God punishes them after they eat the forbidden apple. Allah holds that people could offset their mistakes by devout worship. Pi told the writer the reason for Islamic pray was that people would feel guilty when facing thousands of gods, except Allah. It’s necessary for Pi to believe in tolerant Allah for the reason that he could pray for redemption and save his soul. Only in this way could Pi forget that evil Bengal tiger. That’s why Pi told the writer he hadn’t mentioned Richard Parker for many years.

3.2 The cannibal island

When Pi landed on a small island, he was keen on living there because there was countless food and enough clean water in the day. He wanted to stay there when facing fear towards innocence and death. He also tied the red string given by his girlfriend to the tree which showed he was emotionally attached. When the night came, he saw that the lake began devouring the fish and he found a tooth surrounded by leafs shaped like lotus. The day and night respectively symbolized gifts and demand, eater and food. This was the cruelty of survival. Pi fled away from the island without any hesitation because he couldn’t tolerate himself surviving eating human beings.

The cannibal island was shaped like a woman. In other words, the cannibal island represented his mother. Pi got the supply of his life in this island for he ate the person who was in the same ship of him. His mother also died of protecting him. After he satisfied his basic needs, the tooth reminded him of being unable to stay in desire, so Pi was determined to move on. The cannibal island is a metaphor for Hinduism doctrines. It is the incarnation of Vishnu. Everything in the world is just his dream.

Meerkats are animals which live in caves in dessert in real life. When Richard Parker was chasing after meerkats, other meerkats were indifferent and unconcerned. Many people regarded these meerkats as maggots on the carrion. The cannibal island was a metaphor described as “The fruit was not a fruit. It was a dense accumulation of leaves glued together in a ball. The dozens of stems were dozens of leaf stems. Each stem that I pilled caused a leaf to peel off. Sheath after sheath of leaf lifted, like the skins off an onion. It shrunk from the size of an orange to that of a mandarin. And then it came to light, an unspeakable pearl at the heart of a green oyster. A human tooth. Each contained a tooth. Thirty-two teeth. A complete human set.”(Martel, 2001: 353) What we could see from these teeth was that this was a cannibal island and many people had lost their lives here. These teeth also told us the value orientation of people who died here. They were willing to live here and not to struggle with their fate any more. As a result, they put their drift to an end and maybe they died here both happily and painfully, leaving their life unfinished.

The author Yann Martel showed every aspect of the goodness of human nature through Pi’s struggle with the nature. It was unnecessary to identify whether the cannibal island really existed or not. It was due to the need of the fable and the development of plots. He told people that the cannibal island was a cozy nest weaved by people’s desire and greedy. It brought people illusive and temporary comforts in the day while numerous threats in the night. There also lied a metaphor for life that people could save them only by themselves in such a cozy place like the cannibal island.

3.3 The name of Pi

3.3.1 A metaphor for Pi’s growth

Pi’s full name was Piscine Molitor Patel. Piscine was a French word which represented a swimming pool. In English, it means ichthyic. “Molitor was a name of a swimming pool.”It was a pool the gods would have delighted to swim in.”(Martel, 2001: 14)Through the metaphor of Molitor, we can see that Pi was just like the fish growing up in the ocean and being baptized by the ocean. It was associated with Pi’s unusual drift on the ocean and prepared the ground naturally for the following plots.

3.3.2 Pi=π, a metaphor for the unknown and impermanence in life

In his name, Piscine was pronounced the same as “pissing” which often attracted ridicule from his classmates. When Pi went to Petit Seminaire, the best private English-medium secondary school in Pondicherry, he wrote his full name and double underlined the first two letters of his given name-Pi on the blackboard. What’s more, he added “π=3.14”. It is the circumference ratio that helped Pi gets rid of the trouble brought by his name. π is an irregular and endless irrational number which could represent the constant change and the unknown things in human life. People living in the world will be constrained by various restrictions and fetters both tangible and intangible, such as social norms, religious belief, morality, love and bondage from our relatives and friends. We are locked in a cage in the same way as animals in the zoo.

The irrational number was founded by the ancient Greek mathematician Seebass at the sacrifice of his life, which led to the first mathematical crisis in the history. Pythagorean School held that all the numbers could be expressed as integers or fractional and the universe was absolutely rational and orderly as Mathematics. However, the member Seebass’s founding on irrational number was a challenge for their belief. As a result, Seebass was pushed into the sea by other members. If the world we live in were of the absolute reason and absolute order, then how could the irrational number exist? The existence of the irrational number warns the people of the limitations of rationality and provides the chances to learn about the world and the universe in a rational way (Huang Man, 2013: 148). The similar pronunciations built a metaphor between Pi and π. It shows that life is an irregular and unknown trip; people need to constantly explore their lives. Except the pronunciation, π in this novel was also a metaphor of ethical significance. The appearance of π was the irrational accident against people’s original absolute rationality. This fact also meant that Pi was not always rational and some of his behaviors against the ethics were affected by his irrationality. In a deep sense, it’s a metaphor for mutual struggle, interdependence and the dialectical relationship between the human factor and the animalistic factor.

3.4 Three Religions

When Pi was young, he had faith in many religions, such as Hinduism, Christian and Islamism. He believed these religions were compatible so that he could approach the god and know more about the god. Indeed, Pi represented the whole body of mankind. The writer aimed to require human beings to reflect their beliefs whatever they believed in. The metaphors were as followed. Pi’s mother was a vegetarian. When she wanted some vegetables on the ship, the cook said they ate all the vegetables, pointing to the sausage and gravy which made Pi’s father dissatisfied and fight with the cook. The Chinese sailor wanted to comfort Pi’s family and explained that he also ate gravy although he was a Buddhist for the simple reason that gravy was regarded as a kind of source, not meat. Moreover, Pi struggled with the tiger for a big fish when he was extremely hungry regardless of being a vegetarian. After Pi landed a small island, he crammed himself with plants stem. The same was that Richard Parker filled himself with a large number of meerkats. Strangely, the meerkats didn’t run away, instead they stayed still. This was sarcasm vegetarian and vegetarianism. All the things were made by the creator. There was no essential difference between animals and plants because both the animals and the plants belonged to living creatures. Vegetarianism or religions were built on rich material conditions. People would lay down these outside burdens when they were in a highly material deprivation condition, for example, the Buddhism ate gravy on the ship and Pi fought for a fish.

People’s blind beliefs were related with their endless desire. When having a meal, Pi’s father told him that no one could have so many different faiths at the same time. That someone believed everything meant he believed nothing. Pi’s father hoped that Pi could have his own conscious mind no matter whether it would be in conflict with his father’s. Many readers may consider that the book was criticizing the religious beliefs, but speaking highly of absolute reason. The god didn"t lend Pi a hand, Pi shouted when the storm came.

However, the ideal which the writer wanted to express was totally the opposite one. The tiger was Pi and Pi represented the divinity in one’s heart which affected people’s behaviors. On one side, it was independent of human beings while on the other side, it was part of human beings. People gave it up in many occasions; however, they were guided by it at some crucial time, staying away from the evil.

4. Conclusion

Pi replaced the grim reality with his fantastic drift with the tiger Richard Parker which showed that Pi was unwilling to face the truth that he had killed and eaten the man. People are great because we are rational and can affect the external development. But people are weak at the same time (Qiu Huiting, 2013: 123). Pi knew that killing people and eating people violated ethics and kept it in mind deeply, so he divided the truth into two stories where metaphors were used. In the first story, Pi and tiger respectively represented the humanity and animality, rationality and ferity. The tiger ran out and killed the hyena until the zebra and the chimpanzee were killed which showed there existed irrationality and wildness in Pi. After experiencing various hardships from the outside world, people’s ferity finally defeated the rationality which forced Pi to kill and eat people that violated ethics. The struggle in Pi’s heart was vividly revealed on the paper.

Guided by the divinity, he sailed for the other shore away from barbarity until the tiger disappeared in the jungle. Pi cried loudly because the barbarity of human beings helped themselves survived at the crucial moment. However, the barbarity went unnoticed when human infinitely strived and approached the divinity. Pi said that he saw another soul of himself in the eye of the tiger, but his father said Pi could only see himself in tiger’s eye. His father told a truth that barbarity wasn’t related with emotion and compassion; it was incompatible with the divinity. At the beginning, Pi didn’t believe the word his father said; however, he gradually understood that these two things were contradictory. When the tiger was heading for the jungle, Pi had thought it would turn around. On the contrary, the tiger went directly to the deep forest and disappeared forever in the end. At that time, Pi thought his father was right for the tiger didn’t regard Pi as its friend. Meanwhile, Pi was sure that he saw not only himself in the tiger’s eye, but also something else. The tiger left without any hesitation, but it was with Pi in Pi’s heart of hearts.

Yann Martel carefully designed the metaphors and made Life of Pi not only an adventure story, but also a piece of meaningful fable. The metaphors in this novel have created some new views and made the novel more implicit, novel and enlightening. It attracted readers to pay close attention to the profound significance conveyed by the plot and successfully guided people to reflect deeply on the development of the human nature and the society.

Works Cited

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Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Canada: Random House of Canda, 2001.

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