final essay!

When you turn on the television and see a lion ripping a gazelle to bits ,we as humans are disgusted and saddened by the lion’s vulgarity. In truth humans do the same things but always worst. In the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a young boy Pi is stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger which in fact is a character created by Pi to protect his humanity. Similarly, in the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell, the author uses animals to represent the unkind acts of human beings.

 The authors both use animals to hide the darkness created by our dreadful humanity, which is multiplying.

George Orwell and Yann Martel used animals in their stories to show that to put a human in an animals spot would not only make sense, but makes more sense. Humans are animals and we often forget this when we get tied up in society and our adapted communities.  George Orwell, author of Animal Farm deliberately replaced humans with farm animals specifically pigs because of our similarities with pigs.  In Life of Pi, Pi tells the investigators two stories and states if he replaces the animals with humans “neither makes a factual difference. ” (Martel, pg351) Neither makes a difference because we are animals and the story’s outcome will still be the same.

Pigs are intelligent, clean and social creatures, who are capable of forming thoughts like “All animals are equal but some are more equal then others.” (Orwell, pg64) Pigs are the leaders in animal farm because of their alikeness with humans. Similarly Yann Martel author of Life of Pi chose a tiger, an orangutan and a hyena to represent his human characters. A tiger is fierce and powerful something necessary for Pi to survive alone for two hundred and seven days. Hyenas are scary laughing creatures, which is why Pi represented the cook by one.

Orangutans Are caring and protective of there young, which is why Pi referred to his mother as an Orangutan.

By using animals as their characters images, the authors get all the attributes of the animals without even having to say more then the animal’s species.

Humans are not above animals because our ethics and equality is not balanced with our ever changing world. Every single living organism on our planet has the capability of being kind, compassionate and evil.  When you’re reading the newspaper and see that a child has been murdered, we feel sadness and compassion knowing that we have created this death. Humans are upset by death of other humans because we created them out of soul evilness. Animals such as tigers, lions and hyenas kill for food and survival, which is quite a difference from killing out of evilness. Humans are grotesque and to think that we the killers of evilness are above the killers of survival is naive and untrue. Martel uses animals in place of humans because animals are nicer and it helps Pi cope with the deaths of his friends and family. Orwell uses pigs as the human figures in animal farm to show us that we are animals and we have many similarities with pigs.

The authors used animals to add perspective and depth to the stories. The authors showed readers that animals are innocent and that humans are not as great as we think we are. It is important that Orwell and Martel used animals as human characters because it shows us how absurd it is to see pigs ruling a farm and to see a tiger on a lifeboat, even though this is what is happening in society. Pig like humans are running farms and organizations and fierce humans get stranded just like Pi. Animals are more humanly than humans and to correct the darkness in our ancestor’s history we need to act more like animals. Martel and Orwell show society this by having animal characters in their books.