1. Life of Pi Notes and Background Information Drayton

2. Setting

3. Information about Pondicherry India was a British colony for nearly 200 years. However, Pondicherry was once the capital of French India and so it retains its French culture.

4. Places in Pondicherry Place de la Republic Pondicherry Seafront Aurobindo Ashram

5. Indira Gandhi In 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi found guilty of charges related to her 1971 election campaign. Because of unrest in India, she kept ruling and declared a “state of emergency”—this time period known as the “Emergency” period. It lasted 18 months and ended in March 1977. It was a controversial time period because she took away peoples’ rights and jailed her opponents—yet India was economically successful Pi’s father in life of Pi gets nervous about her taking over his business—and so this causes him to make the decision to move to Canada

6. Characters Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) - The protagonist of the story. Piscine is the narrator for most of the novel, and his account of his seven months at sea forms the bulk of the story. He gets his unusual name from the French word for pool—and, more specifically, from a pool in Paris in which a close family friend, Francis Adirubasamy, loved to swim. A student of zoology and religion, Pi is deeply intrigued by the habits and characteristics of animals and people.

7. Characters (cont.) The Author - The narrator of the (fictitious) Author’s Note, who inserts himself into the narrative at several points throughout the text. Though the author who pens the Author’s Note never identifies himself by name, there are many clues that indicate it is Yann Martel himself, thinly disguised: he lives in Canada, has published two books, and was inspired to write Pi’s life story during a trip to India.

8. Characters (cont.) Discover what roles the following characters play in the novel: Richard Parker Francis Adirubasamy Ravi Santosh Patel Gita Patel Mr. Kumar (both of them) Father Martin The Hindu Pandit

9. Themes The Will to Live The Importance of Storytelling The Nature of Religious Belief

10. Motifs Territorial Dominance Hunger and Thirst Ritual

11. Symbols Pi The Color Orange

12. Point of View Martel wrote Life of Pi in a first person perspective. Pi Patel tells his own story of life through his childhood including an intriguing 227 day journey on a life raft. As a traditional first person narrative the information that the narrator knows, the reader also knows. This is altered a little in Life of Pi because the story is recounted after the event so wisdom and hindsight are also a part of the novel. A first-person point of view is generally an unreliable type of perspective, however in Life of Pi this perspective emphasizes the theme.first person perspective

13. Narrative Structure Frame story: The fake author’s note frames the rest of the story After the author’s note, Life of Pi is written in three sections; the first of which is Pi’s childhood synopsis, the second is the 227 day journey across the ocean to North America, and the third is his experience with the reporters. These formal elements help to define the different aspects of Pi’s character development—and other things we will discuss

14. Part One The first section describes Pi as a little boy in both physical terms and developmental terms. In this section, Martel describes a young boy amazed with the world and all that is in it.

15. Part Two The next section of the novel is dedicated to the main mode of character development. This aspect of the novel describes the origin of Pi’s transformation.

16. Part Three Finally, the last area of the novel represents his ultimate maturation in which he is able to articulate life’s importance and thus the theme of the novel is communicated.

17. Purpose of narrative structure Martel uses the form of the novel to delineate different sections to different areas of the developmental process and in this way the theme is gradually introduced to the reader for the reader can endure the same journey that Pi encountered. The form of the novel is key to understanding the novel.