Cannibalizing authorial self-portraiture in <i>Life of Pi</i>

Abstract Since it won the Booker Prize in 2002, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) has beguiled millions with its incredible tale of a boy stranded for 227 days in the Pacific on a lifeboat with a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. Spectacularly translated to screen (2012) and stage (2019-present), this aspect of the novel has further obfuscated its most intriguingly problematic element: the writer who frames its two incompatible stories with the challenge to choose 'the better story’. An unreliable narrator who breaks out of what at first appears to be a paratextual 'Author’s Note' to narrate his own, apparently irrelevant and misleading chapters within Pi’s story, this writer is a deviant self-portrait of Martel whose cultural appropriation and invasion of privacy reveal Pi’s stories as adaptations of each other. Cannibalizing Pi's 'life' as his own characterization cannibalizes Martel's, the writer’s apparent similarity to Martel and his resistance to adaptation constitute a problem of the author-function for adaptation to resolve, while resuscitating supposedly outdated questions about authorial intention and fidelity in adaptation.