Abstract
＂Life of Pi＂ is a fantasy adventure novel written by Yann Martel in 2002. It depicted how an Indian boy survived a shipwreck by drifting on the lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days. More than an intriguing survival story, this novel involves the postmodern critique on truth and subjectivity. It debunks the binary hierarchy of truth and fiction, and highlights the fact of unfixed subjectivity. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the deep meaning of ＂Life of Pi＂ from the postmodern perspective. The contents will be divided into two parts. The first part explores the inaccessibility of truth through language. Pi's different stories highlight the construction of truth, which is in accord with New Historical criticism. The second part discusses the multiple subjectivity as embodied in Pi's ambiguous relationship with the tiger and the cook. For this part, the poststructuralist philosophy on subjectivity will be applied. This research is significant in that it detects how a best-seller implies the profound theory of postmodernism. While scientific objectivism has become the dominant discourse in today's world, this reading arouses the awareness that truth and identity are subjective social constructs.
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