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
Beatrice and Virgil was around $3 million, probably the highest ever advance for a single Canadian novel. Martel's earlier novel, "Life of Pi", won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and sold seven million copies worldwide. Early on in the story, the protagonist, an author, (some say that the protagonist is a reflection of Yann himself) makes reference to Primo Levi's "If This Is a Man"; Art Spiegelman's "Maus"; David Grossman's "See Under: Love"; Martin Amis's "Time's Arrow"; George Orwell's "Animal Farm"; Albert Camus's "The Plague"; and Pablo Picasso's "Guernica". Extracts are quoted from Flaubert's "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator" which