Innocence

 Author's Note- This is my essay on Life of Pi for Lang. Arts class.  I tried to work on making my conclusion and introduction strong.  Please comment!

Innocence.  Naiveté, guiltlessness, ingenuity.  Those are qualities of young children living in fantasy land or of people who have never done something unspeakably horrid, something that fills them with heart-wrenching guilt.  Something that you're not proud of, and would take back in a heartbeat.  To lose those qualities is like losing a part of yourself, that part of you that still hopes, still wishes and dreams, still has a positive outlook.  In the award-winning novel, entitled Life of Pi, Pi Patel starts off as an innocent, curious boy, finding his religion.  But at the age of sixteen, Pi loses that part of himself; he loses his soft innocence.

Pi doesn't lose his innocence all at once, or at a set time or date.  A string of events slowly strip the innocence from him, but the last event finalizes it and takes away the very last shreds of hope and ingénue.  The first happens after Richard Parker and Pi are the only ones left on the boat, and Pi starts fishing.  Pi goes from crying hysterically over "the muffled death of a flying fish" to "gleefully bludgeoning a dorado with a  hatchet".  His first bit of innocence is lost there, as he kills the flying fish, then the rainbow-colored dorado.  His actions majorly contradicted his beliefs on murder and vegetarianism. They were his first kills, and once they were gone, it couldn't be undone. 

The second event where Pi lost his innocence was when he killed his first turtle.  He had killed and eaten raw fish before, but killing the turtle was symbolic for Pi. In the Hindu beliefs, turtles are extremely sacred animals, because Hindus believe their shell represents heaven and their underside represents earth.  So basically, a turtle is an animal whose magic unites heaven and earth.  Their religion also has a legend that earth is supported by four elephants standing on a giant turtle.  Another reason turtles are important to Hindus is that they believe turtles are also the second incarnation of the powerful god Vishnu.  So by killing the turtle, he is also symbolically killing his religion and his god.  Another example of how he killed his religion at sea is that in Part II of the book, when he's out at sea, Pi doesn't mention religion nearly as much as he does he does in Part I and III.  This is because he starts to lose faith and hope, and instead of practicing religion, survival instincts take over.

There are a few other parts where Pi's innocence is torn, but the climactic moment, the event that finalized it, was the death of the blind man.  When the blind man dies, Pi describes it as "killing a part of [himself] that will never come back to life."  That part of him was his innocence.  By eating some of the dried strips of his flesh, Pi has lowered himself all the way down to cannibalism.  That is an act that will surely destroy his innocence and greatly harm his beliefs.  Not only is he eating meat, but the meat of his own kind. 

Pi talks about religion throughout Part I, but he loses touch with God and Vishnu in the second, and walks away scarred, but wiser and much more knowledgeable about religion than he ever had been.  He does end up getting his religion back, but on his journey, he lost something he will never get back.  His innocence.