Life of Pi Yan, 'Life of Pi' is told from two alternating points of view, the main character Pi in a flashback and Yann Martel himself, who is the "visiting writer" (Martel 101) interviewing Pi many years after the tiger in the boat story. This technique of the intrusive narrator adds the documentary realism to the book, setting up, like a musical counter-point, the myth-making, unreliable narrator, Pi. The reader is left to ponder at the end whether Pi's story is an allegory of another set of parallel events. The novel is a work of fiction set in the summer of 1977 that
The Pi Man good and evil. This draws him into conflict, first with his secretary, and then with the FBI. "The Pi Man" was a finalist for the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. "Kirkus Reviews" considered it to be a "chilling masterpiece", and John Hertz has lauded it as "coruscating, gripping, (and) strange". "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" has posited that Marko's abilities were the basis for the similar abilities of the protagonist in Bester's 1981 novel "The Deceivers", while James Nicoll has noted that the story would work just as well if one assumes that Marko's "justifications for atrocity are