Life of Pie Essay Blog: Prompt 1

           The term "mad" can take on many forms; from being angry to the point of shouting at someone, or mad in the sense of being crazy enough to fly air planes into buildings to prove a point. In the Life of Pi, Pi is not driven to either of these kinds of madness, but driven to a type of madness that is more closely associated with PTSD. PTSD patients, when severe enough, will create alternate realities and truths to cover the horrid experience that the person witnessed or lived. Pi is the character in the novel that undergoes the most psychological, and physical changes into madness, and following and analyzing his story can prove to be rather depressing.
            Being lost at sea has many effects on the mind that one can only imagine if they have experienced it for have been trained for it. Living on solid ground a human's entire life and then traumatically being thrown into a world of nothing but rocking water is a momentous mental hurtle to jump in itself. Then comes the realization that to survive all living things must have food and water in addition to shelter. The temptation of the sea water and the knowledge of the horrid side effects of drinking it is pure torture. While food does not seem to be an issue for alot of the novel, Pi's knowledge of animals helped him survive in this manner. The last factor to what eventually drove Pi to madness was that he was not stranded with other people, but with wild animals. To be initialy out numbered to by them was what eventually cause the more animalistic qualities of Pi to surface.
             The animals that were on the boat took the position as if they were all put in a cage together to survive. The dominant animal would come out the soul victor. In Pi's case, and to his luck, was the tiger. Watching the animals tear eachother apart, it then became "socially acceptable" to be annamalistic. Pi then also starts folowing the law of darwinism, he knows that in direct conflict that Richard Parker would devour him. So he played to the phrase, "if you can't beat em', join em'". Using his knowledge of zoology, he tames the tiger and works with him to keep the two of them alive. When we later learn that none of the animals may have exixted, this takes a very dark turn in which Pi had to literally tame the natural anamalistic instincts that were bursting from him.
             Eventually Pi becomes so much like the tiger he considers Richard Parker to be his true friend. He has given up his lifelong religious preferences to survive in the animalistic state that he is now in. When he used to look at all life with solice, the eventually had no problem snaping countless necks of fish to survive the ordeal. Pi describes how the water had worn down his clothes to nothing. He was in his truly natural state. This also has an effect on Pi in the sence that he can see he is becomming more like an animal. In a sense, this realization and the lack of effort to change show his true inner madness.
           In the end of the book we learn that there is a second story where all the animals were replaced with actual people. This would mean that the only way that Pi could even begin to rationalize what he saw is that these were, not in fact, people but animals turned against one another by true conflict: survival. I think that what Pi actually saw on the boat was to horrendous to be put into thought, much less words. His brain would not let him process the evil that he saw that first week on the raft. His subconciness forced him to remember the story as a tiger named Richard Parker, instead of looking into the mirrior and seeing the true face of who Richard Parker was.



p.s.
Dear Mrs. Leffler,
 I just posted my current events 3 and 4 that you did already give me a grade for, if you wouldn't mind looking over those and reposting the grade that would help me out sooo much! thanks again for everything! I feel like I learned alot in your class and found the AP exam alot easier than I expected and I wanted to thank you for everyting! Happy Summer!