Life Is Pi Rhetorical Analysis

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Pi’s Unreliable Narration Authors write in first-person narration to seize and allure readers into their stories. First-person narration is a good method to attract readers, but it also creates unreliability since only one perspective is outlined. Yann Martel wrote Life is Pi in first-person, causing readers to view the book through the perspective of the narrator, Piscine Patel. Yann Martel does this to cause readers to speculate between the animal story, that involves clues of unreliable narration, and the human story. Pi becomes an unreliable narrator through the trauma he faces, use of a dream rag, and his experience with events that distorted his memory. Pi experiences enough trauma for him to “reach a point where [he is] at the bottom of hell” (217), which leads readers to question the reliability of his narration. The extreme trauma that Pi goes through causes him to lose…show more content…
During the journey, Pi becomes so hopeless that “on many nights [he] was convinced [he] saw a light in the distance” (199). Pi’s mind created the hallucination, hoping for some sign of a rescue from countless days of desperate survival in the Pacific Ocean. Pi also comes to experience blindness, sleep deprivation, starvation, dehydration, and loss of sanity, which all could have distorted his memory and ability to take in his surroundings. Pi even comes to the point where “[he] concluded that [he] had gone mad” (242) during his conversation with the French man. This creates a situation where readers can not fully trust the narrator, who is not in his right state of mind. Additionally, Pi later loses one the of most important senses for a period of time, affecting his ability to grasp the environment. All the events that occurred while he was blind could have been created in his mind since he did not see them. Pi proves to become a narrator that experiences so many events that affect his
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