Life of Pi: A Bildungsroman of Nonhuman Turn

Shu-Fen Tsai
Associate Professor, Department of English, National Dong Hwa University

Abstract
  Unlike most coming-of-age novels that deal with the hero’s struggle with humans and within human societies, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) is about a young hero’s growing experience with nonhuman forces—a zoo garden, a tiger and the Pacific Ocean. When cast out to sea, Pi’s self is crushed, and he must learn how to connect with the tiger to survive at the sea. Besides the changing relation between the boy and the tiger, somatic and bodily affect is carefully illustrated because it is the participation both of man and the tiger in the shared emotions of fear, love and wonder, which makes Pi grow from a boy to a man. And it is the harsh experience of drifting on the ocean for 227 days that initiates Pi into the great mystery of mother nature. Pi’s grand adventure as a castaway is presented as Pi’s religious coming-of-age ritual into the wilderness. The overall reading experience of the novel (boosted by Ang Lee’s film version in 2012), elevates Life of Pi to become a collective eco-dream for modern audience. To sum up, this paper reads Life of Pi as a bildungsroman of nonhuman turn in the sense that the nonhuman world acts as decisive forces able to challenge and to reshape a hero’s sense of self.

Keywords: animal, Bildungsroman, eco-criticism, nonhuman, nature