Pi's Morality

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Morality is a somewhat controversial topic, whether the argument is about its presence in scientific experiments or simply a person’s daily life. At its most basic, it is the difference between right and wrong and how this shapes human behavior. People can normally have trouble upholding their resulting values; in a life-or-death situation, they may be forced to abandon the morals they’ve established in order to survive. Pi, the titular character of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, demonstrates the latter while stranded on a lifeboat. He starts out with many religiously-influenced morals, but as his journey wears on, he begins to rely more on instinct over his beliefs. One of the first things revealed about Pi’s character are his “strange religious…show more content…
In the alternate story, he watches his mother get decapitated by the cook, whom he kills in response. Pi is extremely guilty in his narration, saying that “he was such an evil man...worse still, he met evil in me...I must live with that”. He then adds “I turned to God. I survived.” (Martel, 311). Even though Pi eventually came to terms with taking the life of the cook, who had killed everyone else on the boat, by eating a fish he had “profited from a pitiful flying fish’s navigational mistake” (Martel, 185). Similarly, he is not at all remorseful when he later catches a dorado, because he used bait that the dorado took. By the end of his ordeal, Pi is mostly apathetic about what he kills and eats, because his survival took precedence over that of animals. While he is talking to his “brother”, another stranded man, he refers to the killing of human beings as “need expressed in all its amoral simplicity” (Martel, 247). This shows how much his perspective has changed since the ship sank. Before his displacement, Pi most likely would have condemned any type of killing; human or animal. This viewpoint also allows him to see the disaster through the eyes of the aforementioned cook. Although he eventually tries to kill Pi himself, Pi rationalizes the killing of the sailor and his mother as need without knowing any context. As they are referred to as “a man and a woman” with no identifying details, he just sees them as generic, random people. This may be excused, however, by the fact that Pi may not have been completely in his right mind and therefore may not have reacted the same way if he had been undisputedly
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