LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 16:7 July 2016
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Survival Instincts in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man
And The Sea And Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi

S. Vandhana, M.A


Abstract

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea and Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi made them significant novelists of Nautical Literature. Their main focus is on survival of their protagonists. Both the novels have an autobiographical touch in them. Hemingway had described his own fishing experience in Gulf Stream in The Old Man And The Sea and Yann Martel wrote Pi’s own story narrated to him by Pi. Santiago in The Old Man And The Sea and Pi in Life Of Pi are the victims of wilderness. The Old Man And The Sea was constructed like a five-act play. The incidents unfold in a dramatic manner. The incidents that happened over the next three days include Santiago catching the marlin and losing it consequently. The harpooning of the marlin and its destruction form the climax and anti-climax respectively. Life Of Pi has built in three parts. The first part dealt with Pi’s childhood. The second part narrated Pi’s survival in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with Richard Parker, an adult Bengal Tiger. The third part described Pi’s conversation with two officials fromthe Japanese Ministry of Transport about his survival in sea with a tiger. In The Old Man And The Sea, Hemingway had given equal importance to both Santiago and Manolin, though Manolin appeared only in the minor part of the novel. In Life Of Pi, Yann Martel focused mainly on Pi’s survival story and with lesser importance on other characters in the novel. Both the novels end positively with a sad note. In The Old Man And The Sea, though Santiago had survived, he lost his greatest catch in his life. Similarly, in Life Of Pi, Pi also survived from all the dangers that fate had offered him. But the loss of his greatest companion, Richard Parker made him gloomy. Thus both Ernest Hemingway and Yann Martel had dealt with the theme of survival successfully in their respective novels.

Keywords: survival, sea, companionship

Survival

In A Survival Guide for Life: How to Achieve Your Goals, thrive in adversity and grow in character Bear Grylls says that,
We can’t always choose our circumstances but we can choose how we respond to what life throws at us, and there is power when we realize our ability to alter our destiny. (278)
The term “Survival” was first employed by the British anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor in his Primitive Culture (1871). Survival is the fact or state of continuing to live or exist, especially in difficult conditions.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

S. Vandhana, M.A.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
The Standard Fireworks Rajaratnam College for Women
Sivakasi 626 123
Tamilnadu
India
vandhanahero@gmail.com
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