A Study Of Life Of Pi From The Perspective Of Myth-archetypal Criticism

Canadian writer Yann Martel won the Booker Prize, the highest award in English fictionin2002for his novel Life of Pi. He is known for his story-telling techniques and profoundthoughts in Life of Pi. One of the noticeable techniques his used in the novel is his use ofarchetypes. In Life of Pi Yann Martel used a lot of archetypes from Greek myths and religiousmyths in this novel.Myths are traditional and ancient but the ways they are presented can be contemporary ormodern. By using various myth-archetypes and similar narration structures of myths in Life ofPi Yann Martel seems to tell an odd adventure story, but actually he wants to express hisconcern about the society and about man as a whole.This thesis studies Life of Pi from the perspective of myth-archetypal criticism. Thethesis starts its discussion by exploring the relationship between myth, myth-archetypes andthe novel Life of Pi with the purpose of establishing the theoretical foundation for the study,and then discusses the novel from aspects like archetypes and structure or plot of myths’narration to find the generalities within the characters, imageries, motives and narrationmethods and that of many myth-archetypes. And then, from the aspects of literary, aestheticand realistic functions, this paper analyses how Yann Martel diversifies his writing methodsand voices his idea about human existence through his writing techniques of replacement anddeformation, parody of myth stories and narration structures of myth-archetypes. This thesisfocuses on Yann Martel’s mythical method in Life of Pi in an effort to reveal Yann Martel’sidea of reflecting the social problems of the contemporary society, to dipict man’s psyche inthe contemporary world and to stop the contemporary world from going chaotic for inmyth-archetypes Yann Martel sees more of man’s true self, more of values that contemporarymen should cherish and more of artistic value in the literary creation.