Pi’s Lifeboat, the Serpent or the Rope? A Vedantic Reading of Maya in Yann Martel's Life of Pi

Abstract

Yann Martel’s celebrated novel, Life of Pi, is most often read as a gripping tale of survival and a castaway narrative. Protagonist Piscine Molitor Patel known as Pi finds himself stuck on a lifeboat, his family gone Pi at the brink life contemplates petrifying situation that is now his shocking reality. Beyond its surface as a castaway narrative, however, the novel “is a religious allegory” (Kuriakose 140). Pi’s faith forms a major thematic trope in the novel as it is a vital source of his strength and moral solace amidst his atrocious suffering in the wild. Thus, this article will attempt to trace the Vedantic tenet of Maya in the novel, Life of Pi on two levels. One, on its exploration of the polysemic narration and another on the level of Pi’s ontological crisis as wherein his 227 days long tribulations, the shipwreck of Tsimtsum and Pi’s crisis of faith are investigated under the lens of Maya. The paper shall attempt to prove that the novel within its narrative illusion and Pi’s tribulations illustrates Indian philosophical tenet of Maya- illustrative of the Vedantic distinction between the empirical, illusory world of appearance i.e the Maya v/s the ultimate, singular reality i.e. the Brahma.