Abstract Symbols and symbolisms across literary genres are powerful rhetoric devices used to enhance not only writers‟ style, but to convey richness in meaning that transcends narrative descriptions. However, as its interpretations are context-bound, it causes anxieties for the under-proficient language teacher who, firstmost, requires deep specific content knowledge to drive instruction and enhance cognition amongst learners. Using qualitative descriptive case study, this paper aims to provide specific content knowledge by examining the literary use of symbols, symbolisms and significance in Yann Martel‟s „Life of Pi‟, which has been prescribed as a set book for Grade 12 school-exiting learners in South Africa, for the year 2017 onwards. The paper will – by analysing arbitrary, cultural and personal symbolisms and significances, mostly through psychoanalytical lens – unravel covert meanings and messages in cultural, religious and environmental contexts whilst simultaneously showing how these are pivotal to understanding major themes in the novel. Key words: Lif

“[A]nimals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them” (Berger 14). The Western intellectual history has always been keen on ‘othering’ the animals and using the animal imagery as a mode for ‘othering’ humans. This paper is an attempt to analyse Life of Pi from a vantage point where both the forms of ‘othering’ meet. Just like Colonisation of a country being as much psychological as political/social, the ‘othering’ of animals are found to be equally anthropomorphic as much as physical. The episodes between Pi and Richard Parker will be analysed so as to identify the presence of such anthropomorphism underlying in the narrative, if any. The two stories narrated by Pi to the two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport who came to enquire about the shipwreck- one with animals as its characters and the other in which humans replaces the animals- will be studied to point out the paradox existing in the narrative regarding the whole concept of the ‘other’. The paper will also explore how anthropocentricism force animals to exist more in representations rather than in real which eventually justifies the ‘ethical acceptability’ of exploiting/killing the ‘non-human other’. The study is expected to open up new perspectives in analysing the representation of animals as the ‘other’ in literary narratives as well as to provide a different outlook to the human-animal relationship within and outside the text.

This article examines the metafictional and postmodernist matrix of Yan Martel's novel Life of Pi. As a work of postmodernist and historiographic metafiction, it violates established conventions of the novel both in its form and content, and exploits techniques such as story within story, story with no beginning and end, transgression of artistic boundaries, and deconstruction. By refusing to force upon the reader a ―master narrative,‖ by giving him the choice of both the beginning and the ending of the story, and by showing him the possibility of interchangeability of characters and themes in fiction, the book urges the reader to have a new reading culture by participating in, sharing and contributing to the great imaginative and artistic exercise of the writer. And as a historic move, in a world that is torn by conflicting religions that are trying to overpower or destroy one another, it deconstructs the popular concept of religion in order to expose what is ―undeconstructable‖ in religions, and to have a new ―singular‖ conception of religion and God that is not doctrinal and dogmatic, but one that is constantly evolving.

Along with "Out Too Far: Half-Fish, Beaten Men, & the Tenor of Masculine Grace in Old Man & the Sea," this was written soon after departing Jamaica (where I taught both texts), and initiates a body of work re-visioning human-animal relations. Yann Martel framed Life of Pi as “a story that will make you believe in God.” I use three approaches to the “new vision of God” this fiction is said to inspire: 1) Revisioning the Creator by rethinking human-animal relations 2) The balance of science and religion as a necessary part of “believing in God” 3) The privileging of a good story over either religion or science. Pi gets a new faith precisely by having to “worship” outside of institutional contexts, while surviving 227 days alongside a Bengal tiger. Martel’s “better story” trumps either science or religion. The better story is itself an object of adoration, a means through which one glimpses faith. Martel notes: “The theme of this novel can be summarized in three lines. Life is a story. You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.” Thus, “believing in God” requires us to suspend disbelief while we listen to fantastic stories about a world in which truth is stranger than fiction. As various voices in Life of Pi remind us, the “better story” is the one that includes animals. So the story that makes us “believe in God” decenters human beings. This better story puts animals back at the center of both our secular and religious imagination.

In this article, I have discussed how can we analyze an adventurous and fantasy Novel like “Life of Pi” from human ecological perspective. Knowledge is generated and applied in diverse spatial and temporal contexts, which has varied implication to individuals, households, communities, and human kind as a whole. The implication confines not only to human being would be equally implicate to the surrounding of biotic and abiotic elements. The human ecological knowledge of “Life of Pi” is one of such case. The early life of Mr. Pi and his social educational background had great implication on his later academic life, thinking, acting and feeling as well as for livelihood. How diversity plays a great role in our perception and creates beautify of life around us? The difference between 'knowing how' and 'knowing that' is felt by people of different socio-economic background. Knowing how is more relevant in the context of practical or empirical knowledge. Knowing that is a formal informed knowledge with little connotation of empirical understanding. Combination of both types of knowledge is important in human ecological analysis. In this article I have tried to explore complex connectivity in relation with human being, diverse animal’s world, and landscape relation from human ecological perspective which can be vividly locate in the Novel.