Three Ways of Looking at a Tiger: Animal Minds in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi

Abstract

Engagement with animals is a central theme in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, reflected and shaped by the character-narrator Pi’s reading of animal minds. The article examines attributions of minds to animals in three types of encounters with them: observation, interaction, and narration. While in childhood Pi tends to project human temperaments and emotions onto animals, he is forced to recognize animals’ species-specific experiences as the shipwreck foregrounds his embodiment. As such, the novel introduces the logic of nonhuman psychology into narrative development, formulating an intersubjective and interspecies relationship. Furthermore, at the end of the novel, it alerts us to intellectual and therapeutic functions of animals as narrative elements through comparison between representations of human and animal minds. The text not only identifies different presences of animals in the human world, but generates insights into how narrative in general conveys and responds to complex human-animal entanglements in our reality.