THE LIFE OF A PI (novel) in pdf
DESCRIPTION:
Life of Pi is divided into three sections. In the first section the main character Pi Patel, an adult Canadian, reminisces about his childhood in India. His father owns a zoo in Pondicherry. The livelihood provides the family with a relatively affluent lifestyle and some understanding of animal psychology. Pi describes how he acquired his full name, Piscine Molitor Patel, as a tribute to the swimming pool in France. After hearing schoolmates tease him by transforming the first name into "Pissing", he establishes the short form of his name as "Pi" when he starts secondary school. The name, he says, pays tribute to the irrational number which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. In describing his experiences Pi describes several other unusual situations involving proper names. Two visitors to the zoo, one a devout Muslim and one a committed atheist, bear identical names. A memorably ferocious tiger at the zoo bears the name Richard Parker as the result of a clerical error in which human and animal names were reversed.[9]
Pi is raised a Hindu who practices vegetarianism. As a fourteen-year-old he investigates Christianity and Islam and decides to become an adherent of all three religions, saying he "just wants to love God."[10][11] He tries to understand God through the lens of each religion and comes to recognize benefits in each one.
Shifting government policies led to a decision by Pi's father to sell the zoo and emigrate with his wife and two sons to Canada. The second part of the novel begins with Pi's family aboard the Tsimtsum, the Japanese freighter that is transporting animals from their zoo to North America. A few days out of port from Manila, the ship encounters a storm and sinks. Pi manages to escape in a small lifeboat, only to learn that the boat also holds a spotted hyena, an injured Grant's zebra, and an orangutan. To Pi's distress, the hyena soon kills the zebra and then the orangutan. At this point Pi learns that a 450-pound Bengal tiger has been hiding under the boat's tarpaulin: Richard Parker, who had boarded the lifeboat with ambivalent assistance from Pi himself. The tiger kills and eats the hyena.
Frightened, Pi constructs a small raft out of rescue flotation devices, tethers it to the stern of the boat and retreats to it. He begins conditioning Richard Parker to take a submissive role by using food as a positive reinforcer and seasickness as a punishment mechanism while using a whistle for signals. Pi asserts himself as the alpha animal and is eventually able to share the boat with Richard Parker.
No comments:
Post a Comment