Abstract
Elaborating on parallel, substitutional and correlated elements of the narrative in Yan Martel’s Life of Pi, this study aims at examining Martel’s technique for presenting a believable story in his novel. To discuss the way the believability of Pi’s narrative gets solidified, this enquiry takes advantage of the organizing principles of structuralism, namely, the metonymical-syntagmatic and the metaphorical-paradigmatic axes. Attributing the various correlating elements of the novel to these axes shows that what actually makes Pi a reliable narrator and simultaneously his narrative believable are the very parallel structures of the novel. Keywords: structuralism; metonymical-syntagmatic axis; metaphorical-paradigmatic axis; believability
Highlights
Life of Pi is constructed on a key sentence formulated in the preliminary dialogue of the novel when Francis Adirubasamy, Pi Petal‘s old swimming guru, directly addresses the Canadian anonymous novelist who has come to India due to the failure in his career and his consequential penury: ―I have a story that make you believe in God‖ (Martel 2002, p. x)
Pi‘s later introspection in the novel is in this line, ―religions abound with stories‖ though Father Martine corrects him and remarks, ―Their religion [Christianity] had one Story, and to it they came back again and again, over and over
Believability here means the state of convincing the reader of the potential reality of the narrated events, and is attainable if, as Aristotle puts in his Poetics, the plot represents plausible characters, situations, and actions
Summary
The nicer knowledge of Belief, that what it believes in is not true. Life of Pi is constructed on a key sentence formulated in the preliminary dialogue of the novel when Francis Adirubasamy, Pi Petal‘s old swimming guru, directly addresses the Canadian anonymous novelist who has come to India due to the failure in his career and his consequential penury: ―I have a story that make you believe in God‖ (Martel 2002, p. x). Martel artfully does bring the text of their report, but he encloses the short narrative of chapter 95 in the anonymous novelist‘s pen about how these two agents wrongly, because of ―a fold on the map‖ (Martel, p.289), went to Tomatan while they were supposed to travel to the town of Tomatlan, on the coast of Mexico, where Pi had landed The function of this small narrative, which consists of Pi‘s narrative on his shipwreck and his survival, right after Part Two is to increase the believability of the events Pi has already narrated and emphasize the existence of the official records about the sunken Japanese ship Tsimtsum and its genuine survivor. Structuralism as a method enables the reader to distinguish the parallel components fused in the novel‘s structure and perceive their role in inviting the reader to accept the novel‘s world as a real world
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